Lizard Busters

by sheikyermami on April 23, 2009

Mendacious drama queen Charles Johnson from Little Green Footballs has done enough damage to fill a few freight trains with the corpses of confused fellow-travelers who lost focus and now follow the Obamessiah’s siren song rather than those who stand firm against the global jihad.

In his latest exploits, however, he shot himself in the foot: Johnson, who is quick to smear each and everyone in the fledgling counter jihad movement as ‘racist’ or ‘white supremacist’ or “haters’ , just praised a Muslim, who calls himself ’Michael van der Galien’ and runs a blog called POLIGAZETTE as one “who gets it” . Needless to mention that Michael van der Galiën turns out to be an Islamic infil-traitor, Armenian holocaust denier and Pamela from Atlas Shrugs is quick to rip the mask off:

MICHAEL VAN DER GALIEN, POLIGAZETTE, IS A CONVERT TO ISLAM AND GENOCIDE DENIER

Consider the source. His post is particularly disgusting and mendacious. Just for knowing, Michael van der Galien is a convert to Islam. In his own words. Think he’s biased against the ‘Jewess’ (which is what I am called by another LGF supporter on Holocaust Remembrance day, no less). Lovely.

• “Pure Islam” and Michael van der Galiën


• Denying” Fake Genocide: 5 Years in Jail


• The Armenian Question Answered - endorsed, but not authored by van der Galien


• The Armenian Lobby

* One Pamela is worth more than a million lizards. Now go and smoke that in your bong!

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"God's Law can't hurt me!"

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When Men Forgets God

Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was asked to account for the great tragedies that occurred under the brutal communist regime he and fellow citizens suffered under.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stated the following in relation to atheism:

“ Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia:

"Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval.

But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."[43]

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Evolutionary Racism

Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf was a work which contained evolutionary racism.[1] In his work Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote of "Monstrosities halfway between man and ape" and decried Christians going to "Central Africa" to set up "Negro missions," which Hitler stated resulted in the turning of "healthy . . . human beings into a rotten brood of bastards."[2]

Adolf Hitler also wrote the following evolutionary racist statement in Mein Kampf:

"The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he, after all, is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development (Hoherentwicklung) of organic living beings would be unthinkable."[3]

Charles Darwin was also an evolutionary racist.[4][5]

Prominent evolutionist Richard Dawkins stated:

“What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question."[6]

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"Creationism is the GOP’s giant problem"

Darwinist Rage Boy is horrified that americans have the God given freedom to criticize the Holy Theory of Evolution. He says is his blog:

"Creationism is the GOP’s giant problem"

Actually, the conservatives' giant problem are bogus conservatives who wander among us while wanting us to stop being conservatives. This happens not only in the USA but everywhere. People like Darwinsit rage boy is a perfect example of that. Charles doesn't seem ot realize that the diference between "criticizing evolution" and "teaching creationism" is huge. For him, any criticism you direct at the theory of evolution, even when done by qualified scientists like the ones in the Discovery Institute or the Creation Ministries International, is "disonesty".

The theory of evolution cannot be criticized, saith Darwinist Rage Boy, but only believed. In Charles' religion, if one dares to criticize the theory of evolution, one might aswell criticize that the earth is round shapped.

Give it up, Darwinist Rage Boy. Your bullying tactis won't scare people who want to scientifically criticize your religion. If evolution is as half as solid as your coreilgionists say it is, then it will survive the scientific criticism. However, if it is not, then it's time for you to find a new religion.

Free speech means free speech. Academic freedom means academic freedom. If you don't like that, you can always get some hints from your new friends, CAIR.

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Lizard Lounge

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Rejoice! Christ Is Risen!

(From Conservapedia - 12.04.2009)

After Christ was placed in His tomb, he descended unto the dead. The day after that was Sunday -- the first day of the week -- and Christ rose from the grave! The Angel that rolled away the stone from the door was like lightning, radiant and white as snow.

This terrified the soldiers who stood guard; we are told in the Bible they "became like dead men". (Matthew 28:4 (NIV))

When Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to the tomb, the Angel invited them in and said, "Do not be afraid ... He is not here; he has risen." (Matthew 28:5-6 (NIV))

That light was not only the light of dawn, but was the light of the world, for He is true light -- "the bright Morning Star". (Revelation 22:16 (NIV)) We are able to celebrate this Easter blessed in the knowledge that He has risen. He is the true light of the world, and He shines in and through all who come to Him so that we can live as the light of the world.

There is no better time, no better day, than Easter, to invite Jesus to live in our hearts. We do not need to be in any particular place to find Him, for He is risen! Where is the risen Christ? Is He living in your heart? All you need to do is simply ask Him in!

Prayer: "Heavenly Father, thank you that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead! Let your light shine upon us so that we can go out into the world and bear witness for you that Christ is risen and reigns with You today and forever. Amen."

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Charles Johnson Attacks Rick Warren & Mocks Christian Beliefs

Darwinst rage boy is digging the grave in which he will lay. Turns out that Rick Warren is also in Nancy's "Most Wanted" list. His crime? Saying that he doesn't believe that the world created itself.(Is that the sound of wood picking, and pire preparing that I hear, Darwinist rage boy?)

You can't possibly think that you can ridicule the faith subscribed by the majority of GOPers, and think that people will take you seriously. Where have you been, slick Chuck?!

It's a cardinal tenent of the judeo-christian worldview the belief that we can comunicate with God. Why does that surprise you, Charlie? YES we can!

Anyway, his definition of "evolution" changes all the time. Notice that in the text he quoted, Harris expressily says that "You don’t have to invoke an intelligent designer to explain the complexity we see".

Wait a minute! I thought that "belief in evolution does not preclude belief in God" and vice-versa?!! If you don't have to invoke an Intelligent Cause for the biodiversity, what does that make of the people WHO DO invoke God as the "Author" of the evolutionary process? That makes them look foolish, doesn't it?

But what does it say about the people who write that evolution and God are not mutually exclusive? It reveals that it's a tactical atitude, and not something they honestly believe. Darwinist rage boy is one of them. He knows that it's ridiculous to invoke a god who acts by evolutitonary processes, but he still does it. Why?

Darwinist rage boy is busy attacking GOP beliefs, EVEN during the holliest season of the year for jews and christians. BBC couldn't have done it any better.

Rodan finishes the article by saying:

Charles continues his Jihad on Christianity. Bored with Islam and trying to win acceptance from the left, he has gone all out. Rick Warren expressed his religious convictions. Chuckles is unhappy and now wants to silence Rick.

So very true. In the worldview of the darwinist rage boy, public expression of judeo-christian beliefs is not allowed. A bit like ACLU and stuff.

Charles is really loosing it, and it's not a moment too soon.

(Full article: Charles now attacks Rick warren - LGF2)

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Darwinist rage boy doesn't like academic freedom

Seems to me that darwinist rage boy doesn't like it when people exercize their God given freedom to share their viewpoint. In his worldview, you are only allowed to speak if you agree with him (I know this by personal experience since I was banned from his Reich by criticizing the belief that everything created itself - evolution).

Not happy in teaming up with far left atheistic "science" blogs like Panda's Thumb, darwinist boy has enlisted some wishy washy "republicans" to his evangelistic effort. The last one is Ringo the Gringo.

Suposedly Ringo was schocked - shocked! - that americans would make a museum giving Glory to the Creator, and not giving glory to Darwin. In the creation science musem the same evidence darwinists use to promote the belief that everything made itself is used but this time it is seem from the biblical viewpoint (the accurrate one).

Ringo and darwinist rage boy can't have that, but they cannot be overtly anti-religious or they'll be shunned by true conservatives. So what they do? They claim that the museum is "anti-science".

Yes, it's anti-science if it is in agreement with the Bible, because, as we all know, the Bible hates science. Too bad Isaac Newton (creationist), Faraday (creationist), Maxwell (creationist) and many other scientists were not aware of that.

Another thing worth mentioning is that darwinist rage boy doesn't like the free access to information. This is a major hint that what he believes might be wrong. People who are sure of what they believe don't fear criticism nor the free access to information.

Academic freedom means academic freedom. It does not mean "creationism". What most americans want is the God given freedom to criticize whatever theory they wish, including the theory of evolution. Announcing that the theory of evolution is "science" and that there's no point in criticizing it doesn't do the job. Saying that those who criticize evolution are religious fundamentalists who want to implant a theocracy in the US is nonsense. This is the kind of hype promoted by liberals.

If your theory can't stand scientific criticism, then perhaps it should be taken away from science classes.

Darwinist rage boy may call himself a republican, but he still thinks like a liberal.

Take a look at what bar says about the same subject.

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Religious Fundamentalist and NAS Member Says: Evolution is Oversold

Remember articles like this next Darwinist Rage Boy aka Charles Johnson tries to scam people into thinking that there's no scientific controversy about Darwin's mithology.

Original Article.

Commentary
The Dangers Of Overselling Evolution
Philip S. Skell 02.23.09,
1:47 PM ET

Last week, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne criticized Forbes (See "Why Evolution Is True") for including views skeptical of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in its forum on the 200th anniversary of his birth. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, I beg to differ with Professor Coyne.

I don't think science has anything to fear from a free exchange of ideas between thoughtful proponents of different views. Moreover, there are a number of us in the scientific community who, while we appreciate Darwin's contributions, think that the rhetorical approach of scientists such as Coyne unnecessarily polarizes public discussions and­--even more seriously­--overstates both the evidence for Darwin's theory of historical biology and the benefits of Darwin's theory to the actual practice of experimental science.

Coyne seems to believe the major importance of biological science is its speculations about matters which cannot be observed, tested and verified, such as origin of life, speciation, the essences of our fossilized ancestors, the ultimate causes of their changes, etc.

Experimental biology has dramatically increased our understanding of the intricate workings within living organisms that account for their survival, showing how they continue to function despite the myriad assaults on them from their environments. These advances in knowledge are attributable to the development of new methodologies and instruments, unimaginable in the preceding centuries, applied to the investigation of living organisms. Crucial to all fruitful experiments in biology is their design, for which Darwin's and Wallace's principles apparently provide no guidance.

Contrary to the beliefs of Professor Coyne and some other defenders of Darwin, these advances are not due to studies of an organism's ancestors that are recovered from fossil deposits. Those rare artifacts--which have been preserved as fossils--are impressions in stones which, even when examined with the heroic efforts of paleontologists, cannot reveal the details that made these amazing living organisms function.

To conflate contemporary scientific studies of existing organisms with those of the paleontologists serves mainly to misguide the public and teachers of the young. An examination of the papers in the National Academy of Sciences' premiere journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), as well as many other journals and the Nobel awards for biological discoveries, supports the crucial distinction I am making.

Examining the major advances in biological knowledge, one fails to find any real connection between biological history and the experimental designs that have produced today's cornucopia of knowledge of how the great variety of living organisms perform their functions. It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers and other practitioners of biological science.

It is widely accepted that the growth of science and technology in the West, which accounts for the remarkable advances we enjoy today in medicine, agriculture, travel, communications, etc., coincided with the separation, several centuries ago, of the experimental sciences from the dominance of the other important fields of philosophy, metaphysics, theology and history.

Yet many popularizers of Darwin's theory now claim that without the study of ancient biological history, our students will not be prepared to engage in the great variety of modern experimental activities expected of them. The public should view with profound alarm this unnecessary and misguided reintroduction of speculative historical, philosophical and religious ideas into the realms of experimental science.

It is more crucial to consider history in the fields of astrophysics and geology than in biology. For example, the electromagnetic radiations arriving at our detectors inform us of the ongoing events that occurred billions of years ago in distant parts of our universe that have been traveling for all this time to reach us. And the rock formations of concern to geologists have resided largely undisturbed since their formations.

But fossils fail to inform us of the nature of our ancient antecedents--because they have been transformed into stones that give us only a minuscule, often misleading impression of their former essences and thus are largely irrelevant to modern biology's experimentations with living organisms.

For instance, we cannot rely upon ruminations about the fossil record to lead us to a prediction of the evolution of the ambient flu virus so that we can prepare the vaccine today for next year's more virulent strain. That would be like depending upon our knowledge of ancient Hittite economics to understand 21st-century economics.

In 1942, Nobel Laureate Ernst Chain wrote that his discovery of penicillin (with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming) and the development of bacterial resistance to that antibiotic owed nothing to Darwin's and Alfred Russel Wallace's evolutionary theories.

The same can be said about a variety of other 20th-century findings: the discovery of the structure of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; new surgeries; and other developments.

Additionally, I have queried biologists working in areas where one might have thought the Darwinian paradigm could guide research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I learned that evolutionary theory provides no guidance when it comes to choosing the experimental designs. Rather, after the breakthrough discoveries, it is brought in as a narrative gloss.

The essence of the theory of evolution is the hypothesis that historical diversity is the consequence of natural selection acting on variations. Regardless of the verity it holds for explaining biohistory, it offers no help to the experimenter--who is concerned, for example, with the goal of finding or synthesizing a new antibiotic, or how it can disable a disease-producing organism, what dosages are required and which individuals will not tolerate it. Studying biohistory is, at best, an entertaining distraction from the goals of a working biologist.

It is noteworthy that Darwin's and Wallace's theories of evolution have been enormously aggrandized since the 1850s. Through the writings of neo-Darwinian biologists, they have subsumed many of the biological experimental discoveries of the 20th century. This is so despite the fact that those discoveries were neither predicted nor heuristically guided by evolutionary theory.

The overselling of the theory of evolution, because of the incorporation of these later discoveries, may have done a grave disservice both to those two 19th-century scientists and to modern biology.

The difference between the advances of 20th-century chemical and biological knowledge and the contentious atmosphere that currently prevails in biology alone is worth noting.

Chemists have depended largely on geological sources, from which they have isolated the hundred or so elements on the periodic table and subsequently devised a great variety of schemes for synthesizing millions of new complex arrangements of these elements, giving to the public medicines, fertilizers, plastics, etc., of great utility.

Biologists, on the other hand, have recognized that the natural sources they study are living organisms, each of which is a unique individual, each of which consists of extraordinary complex molecular combinations in configurations that lead to coherent functioning and reproduction. There are no two identical genomes in the biocosm. Now, modern biologists conduct experimental studies that have begun to reveal details of how living organisms function and reproduce.

It is unseemly and scientifically unfruitful that a major focus in biology should have turned into a war--between those who hold that the history of those unique organisms is purely a matter of chance aggregation from the inorganic world and those who hold that the aggregation must have been designed for a purpose.

It is surely not a matter that must or can be settled within the provenance of experimental biology. Above all, declaiming orthodoxy to either of those propositions promotes incivility and draws energy and resources away from the real goal--advances in experimental biological science. These studies, if not derailed, indicate that further advances of great utility can be expected during the 21st century.

Philip S. Skell is emeritus Evan Pugh professor of chemistry at Penn State University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Darwin vs Liberals

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Transsylvania Phoenix Trashes Darwinist Rage Boy

See this article and see how conservatives are fed up with Chuck.

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P.Z. Myers: Americans Who Fund Scientific Research Are an "Ignorant Mob"

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula has responded to my open letter to the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. In my letter, I strongly criticized the Darwinist organization’s endorsement of censorship and its disrespect for academic freedom. I reminded its members that they have a responsibility to the millions of taxpayers who fund their grants, and part of that responsibility entails a modicum of respect and a willingness to accept an open discussion of evolutionary theory in public schools.

Myers replies:

Now we see exposed the Discovery Institute's opinion of scientists: they are parasites, suckling at the public teat…and that we should be divorced from civic responsibilities altogether.

Scientists aren’t parasites. Experimental biologists, physicists, astronomers, chemists, and medical researchers are employees of the people who fund them, generally taxpayers. Most scientists do their work with humility and integrity. They understand, at least implicitly, that they have a responsibility to the public that pays their way. Few scientists engage in censorship, restriction of academic freedom, and boycotts. And they don’t consider such anti-science advocacy a ‘civic responsibility;’ they exercise civic responsibility by welcoming and even encouraging questions about their scientific theories. They respectfully engage those who disagree with their scientific viewpoints. They don’t censor and they don’t boycott, because boycotts and censorship are ideological tactics, not scientific discourse.

I reserve the appellation "parasites" for Darwinists, at least those Darwinists who oppose academic freedom and who sneer at most Americans for whom scientific explanations in nature need not be restricted to unintelligent causes. Many Darwinists — at least Darwinian fundamentalists like Myers — are atheist ideologues who despise the religious beliefs of ordinary Americans who pay their way. Darwinist ‘civic responsibility’ consists of denying other people the freedom to act in accordance with their own views of civic responsibility, which include the civic responsibility to establish educational policy for their own children in their own schools.

Darwinists make their living from ordinary people who they ridicule, censor, and boycott. In this respect they’re not scientists at all; they’re ideologues — atheist fundamentalists — who use science and public funding to advance their metaphysics.

Myers writes:

... What Egnor proposes here is nothing less than a naked threat to use the ignorance of the mob to attack science. [emphasis mine]

American taxpayers who fund scientific research are not "ignorant" and they're not a "mob."

The American public is Dr. Myers’ employer, and for many years it has patiently underwritten the Darwinist ideological crusade. Americans’ patience will run out someday, and they will decide to use their hard-earned tax money to employ ethical scientists who respect academic freedom and who advance real science, not atheist metaphysics.

Posted by Michael Egnor on March 5, 2009 10:55 AM

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Why the Creation Message Matters

http://bayimg.com/image/dancdaabn.jpg

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Darwin's contribuition to science

Having problems seeing the image? See here for the original.

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“We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality”

More nightmares for the Darwinist Rage Boy (aka Charles Johnson.)

From ApologeticsPress.Org

For decades, Darwin’s evolutionary tree of life has been deeply embedded into the walls of science classrooms, the pages of biology textbooks, and the lectures of evolutionary biology teachers. Multiplied millions of high school and college students have seen illustrations of the supposed unicellular common ancestor of all living things at the base of a tree that branches into a plethora of more complex living organisms.

Supposedly, certain unicellular organisms slowly evolved into multicellular organisms, and some multicellular organisms evolved into fish, which then evolved into amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. The image below, which shows a poster that once hung prominently in a university science lab in Searcy, Arkansas, briefly illustrates the standard, widely accepted history of evolutionary progression.

Now, scientists admit that “the tree-of-life concept...absolutely central to Darwin’s thinking, equal in importance to natural selection...lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence” (Lawton, 2009, 201[2692]:34, emp. added).

On the cover of a recent issue of New Scientist was Darwin’s tree of life, along with the statement “Darwin was Wrong” (2009, 201[2692]). Cover-story author Graham Lawton admitted, “The tree of life, one of the iconic concepts of evolution, has turned out to be a figment of our imagination” (p. 34). Lawton reminded readers of Dr. W. Ford Doolittle’s 1999 claim that “the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree” (p. 37).

Lawton also interviewed evolutionary biologist Eric Bapteste of Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, who exclaimed, “We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality” (p. 34, emp. added). Though Darwin’s tree of life has been taught as fact for decades, the truth is, “we have no evidence at all” for it.

Go figure.

Although Baptiste, Doolittle, and many other evolutionists admit that “the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works” (p. 39; Was it ever?), they are not willing to give up their theory.

Baptiste and Doolittle “stress that downgrading the tree of life doesn’t mean that the theory of evolution is wrong—just that evolution is not as tidy as we would like to believe” (p. 39).

It is amazing how year after year, decade after decade, as more information becomes available, yesterday’s standard, rock-solid “proof” of evolution becomes tomorrow’s admission of error. Ernst Haeckel’s professed biogenetic “law” (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) turned out to be nothing more than a hypothesis. Piltdown Man was fraudulently constructed from the jawbone of an orangutan and cranium of a man, though it was paraded before the world as proof of evolution for 40 years (cf. Jackson, 1981; Major, 1996).

Now another “iconic concept of evolution” has fallen on hard times. One wonders what it will take to convince evolutionists that it is not just Darwin’s tree of life that needs to be cast aside, but the entire theory of evolution.

REFERENCES

Jackson, Wayne (1981), “Frauds in Science,” Reason & Revelation, 1[2]:6-7, February, [On-line], URL: http://lovingword.wordpress.com/articles/336.Lawton, Graham (2009), “Uprooting Darwin’s Tree,” New Scientist, 201[2692]:34-39, January 24-30.

Major, Trevor (1996), “Low Down on Piltdown,” Reason & Revelation, 16[10]:77, October, [On-line], URL: http://lovingword.wordpress.com/articles/245.

---

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The Darwinist Rage Boy

Over at Debbie Schlussel:

PerpetuaRe:
Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs. I used to post regularly there but his blog has become almost unreadable due to his obsession over “creationism”. In fact many people are referring to him now as “The Darwinist Rage Boy.”

Charles Johnson = The Darwinist Rage Boy!

Think it will stick?

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Charles' Non-Controversial Theory Generates Controversy

The real world has the habbit of denying darwinian pipe dreams.

Darwinist Charles Johnson believes that there is no controversy "among real scientists" about "evolution".

Putting aside Charles' definition of "real scientist" (which in darwinian vocabulary means "he who believes in evolution") and putting aside whatever he means by "evolution" (which in darwinian mantra means "change" - hmm...where have I heard that before?), the truth of the matter is that there are qualified non-young earth creationist (YEC) scientists who look at Neo-Darwinism and say: No enough evidence to suport it's claims!

Perhaps PhD Skell doesn't know about science

National Academy Scientist Says Darwin's Theory of Evolution is Being Oversold

A robust debate about Darwinian evolution has been taking place over at Forbes.com recently. The venerable techonomy site published over 20 articles in honor of Darwin's birthday, four of which were from ID proponents.

As usual, having any articles skeptical of Darwinism is a bridge too far for some, namely Darwin defender Jerry Coyne who attacked not just the authors, but Forbes itself for the temerity to discuss such views publicly.

No less than a member of the National Academy has responded. Forbes.com has just posted a piece by Philip S. Skell, The Dangers Of Overselling Evolution.

Skell argues that ...

Darwinian evolution is being pushed as a theory of everything.

According to Skell it is being oversold to the public as the foundation of all modern scientific breakthroughs without any basis in reality.

Writes Skell:

To conflate contemporary scientific studies of existing organisms with those of the paleontologists serves mainly to misguide the public and teachers of the young. An examination of the papers in the National Academy of Sciences' premiere journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), as well as many other journals and the Nobel awards for biological discoveries, supports the crucial distinction I am making.

Examining the major advances in biological knowledge, one fails to find any real connection between biological history and the experimental designs that have produced today's cornucopia of knowledge of how the great variety of living organisms perform their functions.

It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers and other practitioners of biological science.

It is widely accepted that the growth of science and technology in the West, which accounts for the remarkable advances we enjoy today in medicine, agriculture, travel, communications, etc., coincided with the separation, several centuries ago, of the experimental sciences from the dominance of the other important fields of philosophy, metaphysics, theology and history.

Yet many popularizers of Darwin's theory now claim that without the study of ancient biological history, our students will not be prepared to engage in the great variety of modern experimental activities expected of them.

The public should view with profound alarm this unnecessary and misguided reintroduction of speculative historical, philosophical and religious ideas into the realms of experimental science.

It is more crucial to consider history in the fields of astrophysics and geology than in biology. For example, the electromagnetic radiations arriving at our detectors inform us of the ongoing events that occurred billions of years ago in distant parts of our universe that have been traveling for all this time to reach us. And the rock formations of concern to geologists have resided largely undisturbed since their formations.

But fossils fail to inform us of the nature of our ancient antecedents--because they have been transformed into stones that give us only a minuscule, often misleading impression of their former essences and thus are largely irrelevant to modern biology's experimentations with living organisms.

For instance, we cannot rely upon ruminations about the fossil record to lead us to a prediction of the evolution of the ambient flu virus so that we can prepare the vaccine today for next year's more virulent strain.

That would be like depending upon our knowledge of ancient Hittite economics to understand 21st-century economics.

Read the entire essay here.

If you're interested in more about what Dr. Skell thinks about Darwinian evolution, and about how he came to be a Darwin skeptic you can listen to three short but informative interviews with him at ID The Future.

Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part One
In this ID the Future podcast, Casey Luskin interviews Philip S. Skell, Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Skell discusses his research, which has included work on reactive intermediates in chemistry, free-atom reactions, and reactions of free carbonium ions.

Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part Two
On this episode of ID the Future, National Academy of Sciences member Phillip Skell shares his story of becoming a Darwin-skeptic with Casey Luskin, explaining how his experience in antibiotic research and the questions he posed to his colleagues inspired his 2005 article in The Scientist, “Why Do We Invoke Darwin?: Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology.”

Interview with National Academy of Sciences Member Philip Skell, Part Three
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews National Academy of Sciences member Phillip Skell on his advice for young scientists who may be Darwin-skeptics. Dr. Skell has been outspoken in his stand for academic freedom and against intolerance.

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May the Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ, Bless America

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Bobby Jindal: Charles' Terrifying Ghost

Darwinist Charles can't stand academic freedom, and people who believe in it. He cannot accept also that americans overwhelmingly suport freedom to discuss other origins theories. It seems that for him, that is a step closer to a theocracy.

Bobby Jindal became Charles' worse nightmare when he aproved the academic freedom bill, allowing teachers to discuss the evidence for and against evolution.

It's kinda pathetic for people try to prevent students from hearing both sides of this issue, when evolutionary scientists are already discussing how some facts don't match with the theory. So it's rather weird for Charles to insinuate that the Law atempts to "sneak the teaching of creationism into Louisiana schools", when it actually it does not. But Charles gets his queue from liberals like Panda's Thumb and PZ Meyers, so it's no wonder that he can't even get the facts straight.

Conservatives worlwide should apreciate political conservatives who show how liberal politics is bad for a nation, but we should be very weary of "conservatives" who want to keep social conservatives as far as possible.

John McCain, even after invinting social conservative Sarah Palin to his side, was weak on the social conservative side. American conservatives turned his back on him, obviously. He clearly was not aware that the strenght of the republican party comes from it's strong morals advocated by social conservatives.

If you destroy the social conservatives from the republican party, the GOP won't be much diferent from the liberals. If you think I am wrong about this, just look at europe.

Some LGF readers ask me: Am I “obsessed?” Do I “hate Christians?” Why do I keep “harping” on this issue?

Answer: The top 3 GOP governors in America are all creationists, who have no problems with teaching pseudo-science to American children.

So presenting the kids with peer reviewed evolutionary articles showing the problems with the theory is "pseudo-science". Hmm. Ok, I guess.

That’s why. This is wrong, and it’s one reason why the Democrats now control both houses of Congress.

Yeah, right. The democrats control both houses because republicans endorse creationism.

But wait! Bush endorses evolution, doesn't he? How come he was not that popular among other liberals?

Secondly, John McCain also seems to endorse evolution. How come he was not elected?

If this anti-scientific insanity continues, the Democrats will be in power for the next 20 years.

Thus saith Charles, son of John, the prophet of California.

Read More

Charles Warns America: If a Creationist Becomes President, the Sky Will Fall!!

Ok ok. Perhaps the title of this post was not exacly what Charles said, but, hey, reading what he believes inteligent design is, is my post really out of touch with his mindset?

You may say "Oh, but you are wrong! Surelly Charles is not advocating that the GOP rejects candidates because they trust in what the Bible says, are you?".

hmmmmm. YES, I am! According to Charles, no creationist president will ever be elected in the USA. Is this true? Is Charles right on this one? Or is he scaremongering conservatives?

Well, first of all, we must understand that, in Charles worldview, "creationist" is anyone who criticizes the belief that the living world created itself. This includes the vast majority of republicans, and perhaps a large percentage of democrats. Is Charles really saying that people who believe that God created by non-evolutionary means are not capable of leading the USA?

Oh, say it isn't soooo!

In the real world, however, things work in a diferent way. Not only the belief that the world created itself is irrelevant for science, but I am pretty much sure that most charismatic american president in the second half of the 20th century (Ronald Reagan) believed that the living world displays evidence for real design.

So if Charles is right, the GOP should have never acepted Ronnie to become a candidate. Fantastic!

Read More

Americans Agree With Darwin: Evaluate Both Sides

From "Evolution News"

Americans Agree With Darwin That the Only Fair Way to Evaluate His Theory Is by “Fully Stating and Balancing the Facts and Arguments on Both Sides of Each Question.”

Anika Smith

From the new Zogby poll this week:

QUESTION: Charles Darwin wrote that when considering the evidence for his theory of evolution, “…a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree with Darwin’s statement?

Strongly agree 45%
Somewhat agree 31%
Total Agree 76%
Somewhat disagree 6%
Strongly disagree 12%
Total Disagree 19%
Not sure 5%

Three-quarters (76%) say they agree with Darwin’s statement, while about a fifth (19%) say they disagree.

At a time when Darwin’s words and ideas are being showcased, it is interesting that his own support for academic freedom and freedom of scientific inquiry is largely being ignored by the media and downplayed by the scientific community. Darwin famously wrote in On the Origins of Species that when considering the evidence for evolution, “a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.” More than three-fourths of respondents said they agreed with Charles Darwin’s statement. This is in line with the results for each of the other questions supporting teaching both the evidence for and against evolution.

Read More

The Strange Case of Little Green Footballs II

About the Darwin-Hitler connection, I’ve written many times before (see here, here, and here, for example), quoting Hitler himself, his standard biographers, and Hannah Arendt. What emerges is that Nazism is indeed a kind of applied Darwinism, unintended by Charles Darwin himself, of course. Ideas have consequences, and some of them are unintended. Obvious, right?

Not to blogger Charles Johnson in Little Green Footballs, who jumped on me in a recent post for writing two sentences in a Jerusalem Post op-ed to the effect that “Hitler himself clearly dismissed as ineffective any fancied strategy to try to whip up Germans with appeals to punish the Christ-killers.

In Mein Kampf, an influential best-seller, he relied on the language of Darwinian biology to declare a race war against the Jews.” And that remains true, despite the fact that Hitler doesn’t cite Darwin as an intellectual influence. Citing influence wasn’t Hitler’s style, but it seems he absorbed his Darwinian worldview from the poisonous popular Viennese press. Richard Weikart goes into detail about this in his important book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which I’ve drawn much from.

Hitler certainly doesn’t cite Christian teaching as an influence either—but that hasn’t stopped critics of Christianity from tying that faith to Nazi anti-Semitism.

Yes, someone will object at this point, but what about the famous line at the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf, “In defending myself against the Jews, I am acting for the Lord”? When Hitler invoked “the Lord,” this was not the God of Christianity, as the immediate context makes crystal clear. “Eternal Nature,” he writes in the preceding paragraph in the same chapter, “inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands." He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin’s laws. Those are Hitler’s “Almighty Creator,” as he goes on to say, the “Lord” whose work he proposes to do by making war on the Jews.

The chapter to read in Mein Kampf is Chapter 9, “Nation and Race,” where he discusses the obligation to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace. His argument is transparently phrased in Darwinian terms.

But you don’t have to be an advocate of intelligent design—or that hooded, phantom menace, a "creationist"—to see this. In Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson writes that “Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism” (p. 5).

If you want the assurance of a liberal and a critic of Catholic Christianity, turn to James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. Carroll notes that the ideal of Nazi-style “blood purity” was articulated by thinkers in the Catholic Church as far back as 1449, specifically by Spanish “Old Christians” who feared that Jewish-born converts to Catholicism would spoil the Spanish Christian limpieza de sangre. Carroll calls Hitler a “product” of this line of racially based anti-Jewish thinking. But for all that the historian wants to emphasize the Church’s guilt, such as it may be, he acknowledges that “the scientific Enlightenment, pursuing its decidedly nonreligious agenda, added its own twist…, especially in the figure of Charles Darwin.”

Carroll quotes Darwin’s fell prophecy in The Descent of Man that “[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” He acknowledges the influence exercised by the “‘Germanizing’ of Darwin, especially in Nietzsche, at least as he was caricatured by the Nazis. Hitler’s all-encompassing ideology of race was a ‘vulgarized version,’ in one scholar’s phrase, of the social Darwinism that held sway in the imperial age among both intellectuals and the crowd.”

“Social Darwinism” is a phrase used to insulate Darwin himself from the consequences of his ideas and his words. Carroll concludes, “So however much Hitler twisted what preceded him, it is also the case that he emerged from it” (p. 477).

I have argued just that, adding only that the influence of Darwinism is the more concrete, since he used biological language in couching his call for race war, whereas he did not use the ancient Christian vocabulary that assailed Jews as “Christ killers.”

We know from other sources of his contempt for Christian belief. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes that what Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was precisely its rejection of the conclusions that followed from Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”

That is point number one I would make to Charles Johnson and other conservatives who share his perspective. There is nothing in defending Darwinian science, if you choose to defend it, that should make you feel obliged to deny the influence that Darwin had on the rise of Nazi race theory.

No, and let me emphasize this because it otherwise always gets lost when people get upset, this doesn't make Darwin a proto-Hitler and it doesn't mean Darwin somehow caused the Holocaust. But it does remind us of an obvious truth: The way you picture how the world works must inevitably influence, somehow, the way you think it should work. Not determine it, but influence it. It's a reason to take a second, critical look at Darwinian theory, not necessarily to reject it. Just that.

The second point is less obvious but possibly more interesting. More tomorrow.

Posted by David Klinghoffer on February 6, 2009

Read More

The Strange Case of Little Green Footballs I

The Strange Case of Little Green Footballs II

About the Darwin-Hitler connection, I’ve written many times before (see here, here, and here, for example), quoting Hitler himself, his standard biographers, and Hannah Arendt. What emerges is that Nazism is indeed a kind of applied Darwinism, unintended by Charles Darwin himself, of course. Ideas have consequences, and some of them are unintended. Obvious, right?

Not to blogger Charles Johnson in Little Green Footballs, who jumped on me in a recent post for writing two sentences in a Jerusalem Post op-ed to the effect that “Hitler himself clearly dismissed as ineffective any fancied strategy to try to whip up Germans with appeals to punish the Christ-killers. In Mein Kampf, an influential best-seller, he relied on the language of Darwinian biology to declare a race war against the Jews.”

And that remains true, despite the fact that Hitler doesn’t cite Darwin as an intellectual influence. Citing influence wasn’t Hitler’s style, but it seems he absorbed his Darwinian worldview from the poisonous popular Viennese press. Richard Weikart goes into detail about this in his important book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which I’ve drawn much from.

Hitler certainly doesn’t cite Christian teaching as an influence either—but that hasn’t stopped critics of Christianity from tying that faith to Nazi anti-Semitism.

Yes, someone will object at this point, but what about the famous line at the end of Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf, “In defending myself against the Jews, I am acting for the Lord”? When Hitler invoked “the Lord,” this was not the God of Christianity, as the immediate context makes crystal clear. “Eternal Nature,” he writes in the preceding paragraph in the same chapter, “inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands." He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin’s laws. Those are Hitler’s “Almighty Creator,” as he goes on to say, the “Lord” whose work he proposes to do by making war on the Jews.

The chapter to read in Mein Kampf is Chapter 9, “Nation and Race,” where he discusses the obligation to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace. His argument is transparently phrased in Darwinian terms.

But you don’t have to be an advocate of intelligent design—or that hooded, phantom menace, a "creationist"—to see this. In Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson writes that “Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism” (p. 5).

If you want the assurance of a liberal and a critic of Catholic Christianity, turn to James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. Carroll notes that the ideal of Nazi-style “blood purity” was articulated by thinkers in the Catholic Church as far back as 1449, specifically by Spanish “Old Christians” who feared that Jewish-born converts to Catholicism would spoil the Spanish Christian limpieza de sangre.

Carroll calls Hitler a “product” of this line of racially based anti-Jewish thinking. But for all that the historian wants to emphasize the Church’s guilt, such as it may be, he acknowledges that “the scientific Enlightenment, pursuing its decidedly nonreligious agenda, added its own twist…, especially in the figure of Charles Darwin.”

Carroll quotes Darwin’s fell prophecy in The Descent of Man that “[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” He acknowledges the influence exercised by the “‘Germanizing’ of Darwin, especially in Nietzsche, at least as he was caricatured by the Nazis. Hitler’s all-encompassing ideology of race was a ‘vulgarized version,’ in one scholar’s phrase, of the social Darwinism that held sway in the imperial age among both intellectuals and the crowd.”

“Social Darwinism” is a phrase used to insulate Darwin himself from the consequences of his ideas and his words. Carroll concludes, “So however much Hitler twisted what preceded him, it is also the case that he emerged from it” (p. 477).

I have argued just that, adding only that the influence of Darwinism is the more concrete, since he used biological language in couching his call for race war, whereas he did not use the ancient Christian vocabulary that assailed Jews as “Christ killers.”

We know from other sources of his contempt for Christian belief. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes that what Hitler found objectionable about Christianity was precisely its rejection of the conclusions that followed from Darwin’s theory: “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.”

That is point number one I would make to Charles Johnson and other conservatives who share his perspective. There is nothing in defending Darwinian science, if you choose to defend it, that should make you feel obliged to deny the influence that Darwin had on the rise of Nazi race theory.

No, and let me emphasize this because it otherwise always gets lost when people get upset, this doesn't make Darwin a proto-Hitler and it doesn't mean Darwin somehow caused the Holocaust. But it does remind us of an obvious truth: The way you picture how the world works must inevitably influence, somehow, the way you think it should work. Not determine it, but influence it. It's a reason to take a second, critical look at Darwinian theory, not necessarily to reject it. Just that.

The second point is less obvious but possibly more interesting. More tomorrow.
Posted by David Klinghoffer on February 6, 2009

Read More

Scientists Copy God’s Design—Without Giving God Credit (Again!)

This item is available on the Apologetics Press Web site at: http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/3829

AP Content :: In the News

Scientists Copy God’s Design—Without Giving God Credit (Again!)
by Eric Lyons, M.Min.

Man has been constructing airplanes for more than a century. From the Wright brothers’ first gliders to Boeing’s popular 747s to the U.S. military’s stealth bombers, flight technology has become so advanced and high-tech that one can only imagine what aviation engineers will invent next, or whence they will get inspiration for new flight designs.

Wonder no more. According to Live Science senior writer Jeanna Bryner, a team of mechanical and aerospace engineers is designing a new, 32-inch spy plane called Pterodrone. According to the design team,

The next generation of airborne drones won’t just be small and silent. They’ll alter their wing shapes using morphing techniques to squeeze through confined spaces, dive between buildings, zoom under overpasses, land on apartment balconies, or sail along the coastline (Bryner, 2008).

Scientists expect Pterodrone to be equipped with gyroscopes and a GPS, while being able to walk as well as fly.

What exactly inspires a group of highly educated, 21st-century engineers to design such a flying machine? Whence is the self-styled “design team” getting inspiration for their new flying mechanism? Answer: From Tapejara wellnhoferi, a flying reptile that supposedly evolved and went extinct 60+ million years ago. Bryner called the pterosaur “one of the savviest movers of the Cretaceous...a morphing machine” (2008). Based upon their study of the fossil record, scientists believe

Tapejara walked on four legs before rearing up on its two back limbs and running to reach takeoff speed. Once airborne, the beast could cruise at some 19 mph.... [T]o snap up fish food, the reptile would bend the tips of its wings up to form a three-mast sailboat structure with its body. The membranous crest atop its head would have served as the third sail, used as a rudder for steering (Bryner).

Mankind has been building flying machines of all shapes and sizes for more than 100 years. Just when you might think that engineers have perfected aircraft design, they improve by mimicking movements of an extinct pterosaur. Amazingly, though evolutionists admit Tapejara was a “morphing machine,” which had “nerves that served as sensors for temperature, pressure and wind direction,” and now has “inspired” a “design team” to build a “newly designed spy plane” (Bryner, emp. added), allegedly the pterosaur itself was simply the product of millions of years of blind, non-intelligent, random chance processes. So “the real deal,” as Bryner called Tapejara, was not designed by a designer, while the copycat is meticulously “designed” by a “design team” during a “design phase” (Bryner). Once again, we see how far copying kings (bio-inspired scientists) will go to reject and dishonor the Creator, the King of kings (Colossians 1:15-18).

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things (Romans 1:20-23).

REFERENCE

Bryner, Jeanna (2008), “New Flying Dinosaur Drone to Look Like Pterodactyl,” Live Science, [On-line], URL: http://www.livescience.com/technology/081008-pterodactyl-revival.html.

---

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We are happy to grant permission for items in the "In the News" section to be reproduced in their entirety, as long as the following stipulations are observed: (1) Apologetics Press must be designated as the original publisher; (2) the specific Apologetics Press Web site URL must be noted; (3) the author’s name must remain attached to the materials; (4) any references, footnotes, or endnotes that accompany the article must be included with any written reproduction of the article; (5) alterations of any kind are strictly forbidden (e.g., photographs, charts, graphics, quotations, etc. must be reproduced exactly as they appear in the original); (6) serialization of written material (e.g., running an article in several parts) is permitted, as long as the whole of the material is made available, without editing, in a reasonable length of time; (7) articles, in whole or in part, may not be offered for sale or included in items offered for sale; and (8) articles may be reproduced in electronic form for posting on Web sites pending they are not edited or altered from their original content and that credit is given to Apologetics Press, including the web location from which the articles were taken.

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“So We Make Up Stories” About Human Evolution

by Kyle Butt, M.A.

Dr. Richard Lewontin is the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Harvard University Press describes him as one of their “most brilliant evolutionary biologists.” A Harvard professor since 1973, he has impeccable academic credentials, and has gained worldwide notoriety for authoring several books, including The Triple Helix, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, and Biology as Ideology.

During the week of February 14-18, Dr. Lewontin was invited to speak at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting held in Boston, Massachusetts. Michale Balter, writing for Science magazine, reported briefly on Lewontin’s comments that caused quite a stir in the evolutionary community. Balter titled his article “How Human Intelligence Evolved—Is It Science or ‘Paleofantasy’?” (2008). In the first paragraph, Balter quipped that Lewontin really “knows how to grab an audience’s attention.”

What did Lewontin say that was so noteworthy and attention-grabbing? Lewontin “led off a session titled ‘The Mind of a Toolmaker’ by announcing that scientists know next to nothing about how humans got so smart. ‘We are missing the fossil record of human cognition,’ Lewontin said at the meeting. ‘So we make up stories’” (Balter, 2008, emp. added). While Balter spent the rest of his article scrambling to show that Lewontin’s conclusions are not recognized by all in the scientific community, Lewontin’s devastating blow to evolution’s long-cherished scenario of human development could not be papered over so easily.

James Randerson, science correspondent for the United Kingdom’s Guardian, wrote an article titled “We Know Nothing About Brain Evolution” in which he, too, reported on Lewontin’s speech. Lewontin titled his speech, “Why We Know Nothing About the Evolution of Cognition.” Randerson reported that, in the lecture, the eminent Harvard professor “systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line” (2008, emp. added).

Lewontin then turned his attention to the fossil record. Randerson summarized Dr. Lewontin’s statements by saying: “The main problem is the poor fossil record. Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m [million—KB] years or so, we can’t be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us. Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches” (2008). Randerson continued, stating: “Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret. ‘I don’t have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means,’ Lewontin confessed. What does a particular brain size tell us about the capabilities of the animal attached to it?” (2008).

Of course, Lewontin’s comments fly in the face of everything the general population has been led to believe about human evolution. The beautiful drawings showing ape-like creatures gradually evolving in a straight line into humans have been plastered on science-lab walls, in science textbooks, and in popular science magazines for the last five decades. We have been told that the hominid fossil record is so complete that it provides irrefutable evidence verifying human evolution. We have been told that our “ancestral” fossils indicate exactly when our ancient great-grandparents began to walk upright, when they evolved greater cognitive skills, and when they evolved into us.

Lewontin was not finished tearing into the standard evolutionary party line about hominid fossils. Randerson noted that Lewontin “is even skeptical that palaeoanthropologists can be sure which species walked upright and which dragged their knuckles. Upright posture is crucial for freeing up the hands to do other useful things” (2008).

What, then, did Lewontin conclude regarding the prevailing status of ignorance that pervades the scientific community regarding the supposed evolution of humans? He said: “We are in very serious difficulties in trying to reconstruct the evolution of cognition. I’m not even sure what we mean by the problem” (as quoted in Randerson, 2008).

The bombshell that Lewontin dropped on the 2008 AAAS annual meeting will leave devastating and lasting carnage in its wake in the evolutionary community. He debunked 50 years of orchestrated evolutionary propaganda. Randerson concluded his summary of Lewontin’s statements by observing: “All in all, despite thousands of scientific papers and countless National Geographic front covers, we have not made much progress in understanding how our most complicated and mysterious organ [brain—KB] came about” (2008).

After reviewing Lewontin’s statements and the various journal articles describing them, the writers of Creation/Evolution Headlines appropriately admonished the reader:

Remember this entry the next time you get a National Geographic cover story of a hominid with a philosopher’s gaze. Remember it when you are told stories about hominids walking upright, their hands now freed to scratch their chins and think. Remember it when you are shown a chimpanzee on NOVA performing memory tricks for a banana or smashing bugs with a rock. Remember it when a stack of erudite scientific papers on human evolution is placed on the witness table at a trial over whether students should be allowed to think critically about evolution in science class (“Paleofantasy...,” 2008).

REFERENCES

Balter, Michael (2008), “How Human Intelligence Evolved—Is It Science or ‘Paleofantasy’?” Science, 319 [5866]:1028, [On-line], URL: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5866/1028a.

“Paleofantasy: Brain Evolution is Mere Storytelling” (2008), Creation/Evolution Headlines, February 22, [On-line], URL: http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev200802.htm.

Randerson, James (2008), “We Know Nothing About Brain Evolution,” Guardian, [On-line], URL: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/02/the_distinguished_biologist _pr.html.

---

Copyright © 2008 Apologetics Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

We are happy to grant permission for items in the "Sensible Science" section to be reproduced in their entirety, as long as the following stipulations are observed: (1) Apologetics Press must be designated as the original publisher; (2) the specific Apologetics Press Web site URL must be noted; (3) the author’s name must remain attached to the materials; (4) any references, footnotes, or endnotes that accompany the article must be included with any written reproduction of the article; (5) alterations of any kind are strictly forbidden (e.g., photographs, charts, graphics, quotations, etc. must be reproduced exactly as they appear in the original); (6) serialization of written material (e.g., running an article in several parts) is permitted, as long as the whole of the material is made available, without editing, in a reasonable length of time; (7) articles, in whole or in part, may not be offered for sale or included in items offered for sale; and (8) articles may be reproduced in electronic form for posting on Web sites pending they are not edited or altered from their original content and that credit is given to Apologetics Press, including the web location from which the articles were taken.

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This item is available on the Apologetics Press Web site at: http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/3641AP Content :: Sensible Science

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EVOLUTION WATCH - Judge copied ACLU in anti-intelligent design ruling

This is a WorldNetDaily printer-friendly version of the article which follows.
To view this item online, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=39256


Thursday, December 11, 2008



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EVOLUTION WATCH - Judge copied ACLU in anti-intelligent design ruling


Study: 90% of 'masterpiece' Dover opinion
error-filled 'cut-and-paste' job by 'activist'verbatim

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: December 12, 2006
11:00 am Eastern



By Art Moore



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WorldNetDaily.com



Judge John E. Jones III
A historic judicial ruling against intelligent design theory hailed as a "broad, stinging rebuke" and a "masterpiece of wit, scholarship and clear thinking" actually was "cut and pasted" from a brief by ACLU lawyers and includes many of their provable errors, contends the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.

One year ago, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones' 139-page ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover declared unconstitutional a school board policy that required students of a ninth-grade biology class in the Dover Area School District to hear a one-minute statement that said evolution is a theory and intelligent design "is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view."

University of Chicago geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert called Jones' ruling a "masterpiece of wit, scholarship and clear thinking" while lawyer Ed Darrell said the judge "wrote a masterful decision, a model for law students on how to decide a case based on the evidence presented." Time magazine said the ruling made Jones one of "the world's most influential people" in the category of "scientists and thinkers."

(Story continues below)


But an analysis by the Discovery Institute, the leading promoter of intelligent design, concludes about 90.9 percent – 5,458 words of his 6,004-word section on intelligent design as science – was taken virtually verbatim from the ACLU's proposed "Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law" submitted to Jones nearly a month before his ruling.

"Judge Jones' decision wasn't a masterpiece of scholarship. It was a masterpiece of cut-and-paste," said the Discovery Institute's John West in a phone conference with reporters yesterday.

West is vice president for public policy and legal affairs for the group's Center for Science and Culture, which issued a statement saying, "The finding that most of Judge Jones' analysis of intelligent design was apparently not the product of his own original deliberative activity seriously undercuts the credibility of Judge Jones' examination of the scientific validity of intelligent design."

Judge will not comment

WND reached Jones' deputy, Liz O'Donnell, at the judge's chambers in Williamsport, Pa. But she said Jones would not comment.

"He appreciates being given a chance to comment, however, other than advising anyone to read his opinion, he will not comment on any Discovery Institute release," she said.

O'Donnell said Jones has read Discovery Institute's two-page press release but not the full 34-page document that includes side-by-side comparisons between the ACLU's text and his opinion.

She declined an offer to have the study sent to Jones for his perusal and response.

Bruce Green, director of Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics at Fordham Law School, told the Associated Press it is not typical for judges to adopt one side's proposed findings verbatim, although there's "not a rule that categorically forbids it."

"Courts have sometimes criticized the practice, especially when it looks like the judge didn't do any independent thinking," Green said.

'We were stunned'

The Discovery Institute has opposed the Dover school board policy because it thinks attempts to mandate intelligent design are counterproductive. But the group became involved in the case as part of its effort to ensure courts do not restrict an open discussion of evolution in schools.

Proponents of intelligent design say it draws on recent discoveries in physics, biochemistry and related disciplines that indicate some features of the natural world are best explained as the product of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. Advocates include scientists at numerous universities and science organizations worldwide.

West, who noted Jones has been giving speeches on his ruling, said the Discovery Institute found out only in September that there had been "extensive copying going on."

"We were stunned," said West, who pointed out Jones even copied several clearly erroneous factual claims made by the ACLU.

Jones, for example, claimed that during the trial, biochemist and Discovery Institute fellow Michael Behe dismissed articles supposedly explaining the evolution of the immune system by saying they are not "good enough." But the court record shows Behe said the opposite: "It's not that they aren't good enough. It's simply that they are addressed to a different subject."

In another example, the judge claimed "ID is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications." But University of Idaho microbiologist Scott Minnich testified there are between "seven and 10" peer-reviewed papers supporting intelligent design.

The Discovery Institute said its study, written by West and David DeWolf, a law professor at Gonzaga University, showed the ruling "reflected essentially no original deliberative activity or independent examination of the record on Jones' part."

"The revelation that Judge Jones in effect 'dragged and dropped' large sections of the ACLU's 'Findings of Fact' into his opinion, errors and all, calls into serious question whether Jones exercised the kind of independent analysis that would make his 'broad, stinging rebuke' of intelligent design appropriate."

West and DeWolf point out Jones has described the breadth of his opinion as being the result of a "fervent hope" that it "could serve as a primer for school boards and other people who were considering this [issue]," which they see as a tacit admission he was a judicial activist.

Even an opponent of intelligent design, they note, Boston University law professor Jay Wexler, says the "part of Kitzmiller that finds ID not to be science is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous to both science and freedom of religion."

West and DeWolf conclude: "The new disclosure that Judge Jones' analysis of the scientific status of ID merely copied language written for him by ACLU attorneys underscores just how inappropriate this part of Kitzmiller was – and why Judge Jones' analysis should not be regarded as the final word about intelligent design."

West contended the critics who saw the Dover decision as a major setback for intelligent design clearly were wrong, citing a recent New York Times report about a gathering last month of scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where there was "a rough consensus" that the theory "of evolution by natural selection" was "losing out in the intellectual marketplace."

"A year after Dover, it's the Darwinists who seem filled with gloom, not us," said West.

He pointed to a number of recent developments. In March, the Lancaster School District in California agreed on a philosophy of science policy stating "Darwin's theory should not be taught as "unalterable fact." In June, South Carolina adopted a science standard requiring students to learn how "scientists ... investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." In September, legal scholar Francis Beckwith was granted tenure at Baylor University amid opposition from Darwinists. Beckwith believes ID can be taught in public schools without violating the Constitution. Last month, the Ouachita Parish School District in Louisiana enacted a policy protecting teachers who cover both evidence for and against Darwinian evolution.



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Related commentary:

What are Darwinists so afraid of?

Seeing God in science

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ACLU and Charles Johnson Agree: Keep God out!

Charles Johnson made a post in which he reproduces Judge Jones' interview. What Charles was careful enough to say that Jones was apointed by Bush. Not only that, Charles was careful enough to cite Jones' words in which he says that he is a "I am a person of faith. I’m certainly not an atheist or an agnostic and I see some divine force somewhere".

Even though Jones sees "some divine force somewhere", he failed to say where does he see that mysterious divine force. Is that divine forse seen through science? Or science belongs to atheism, as many atheists believe?

Anyway, what is important about Charles' post is that he totally "forgot" to mention that judge Jones' decision was almost 90% copied from the ACLU!

Nice going, Charles. Now you are on the ACLU side? Great!

I know that something is wrong when a "conservative" sides with the anti-american, anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-capitalism, pro-homosexual , pro-infanticide ACLU in a legal decision.

Don't forget this: Charles Johnson sided with the ACLU AGAINST the Christians in a legal case.

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Tiktaalik Not a Missing Link

Dec 4, 2008 — Has all the colorful artwork of the fish-a-pod been for naught? Three European biologists that Neil Shubin’ famous Tiktaalik fossil, supposedly of a fish evolving into a four-footed land dweller (see 05/03/2006, 11/13/2008) and achieving near iconic status in the media (01/16/2008) is not a missing link after all.
The situation is much more complex, argued Boisvert et al in a letter to Nature.¹ Those who enjoy the full jargon can follow their reasoning:

The pectoral fin skeletons of Panderichthys and Tiktaalik share certain unusual features such as a blade-like radius and a longitudinal ridge-and-groove on the flexor surface of the ulna. These can tentatively be interpreted as attributes of the ‘elpistostegid’ segment of the tetrapod stem lineage and thus ancestral for the tetrapod forelimb. Given that recent phylogenies consistently place Panderichthys below Tiktaalik in the tetrapod stem group, it is surprising to discover that its pectoral fin skeleton is more limb-like than that of its supposedly more derived relative. In Tiktaalik4, like in ‘osteolepiforms’ and rhizodonts (more primitive fish members of the stem group), the ulna and ulnare are of similar size. The axis of the fin comprises two more elements distal to the ulnare, and the distal radials are arranged pinnately around this axis. In contrast, in Panderichthys and tetrapods, the ulna is much longer than the ulnare, the ulnare is the last axial element, and the distal radials/digits are arranged in a transverse fan shape11 (Fig. 3). It is difficult to say whether this character distribution implies that Tiktaalik is autapomorphic,² that Panderichthys and tetrapods are convergent, or that Panderichthys is closer to tetrapods than Tiktaalik. At any rate, it demonstrates that the fish-tetrapod transition was accompanied by significant character incongruence in functionally important structures.

Being translated, that last sentence says that if these fossils represent an evolutionary line from fish to tetrapod, the features are all mixed up and out of sequence – including the “functionally important structures.”

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1. Boisvert, Mark-Kurik and Ahlberg, “The pectoral fin of Panderichthys and the origin of digits,” Nature 456, 636-638 (4 December 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature07339.
2. Autapomorphic means a derived trait unique to any given taxon, i.e. shared by the ingroup taxa, but excluded from its outgroup taxa. Convergent refers to traits that appear similar but are not phylogenetically related.

If this tale were told by Paul Harvey, “the rest of the story” would undo the first of the story. It wouldn’t bother the evolutionists, though, because that’s what Darwinism is all about, anyway: telling a good story (see 12/22/2003 commentary).
Next headline on: Fossils • Evolutionary Theory

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Darwinian Moonbat and Charlie Agree: Censor is Good

Darwinist Charles Johnson posts a story that shows how darwinian fundamentalists got terrified when a Zoo decided to work in cooperation with the Biblical Creation Museum.

The only point I want to address in here is the following:

"On November 30, 2008, biologist and blogger P. Z. Myers complained about the promotion at his blog Pharyngula, writing, “the Cincinnati Zoo has betrayed its mission and its trust in a disgraceful way, by aligning themselves with a creationist institution that is a laughing stock to the rest of the world, and a mark of shame to the United States,

"Biologist" and "blogger". Did he write what he did because he is a blogger and biologist? Or would it be because he is a rabid atheist, desacrator and one who promulgates violence against those who don't agree that the living world created itself? This is what atheist darwinist Myers said:

"The only appropriate response should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing of some teachers, many school board members, and vast numbers of sleazy, far-right politicians…I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots."

Nice friends you have there, Charlie!

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