Some Scientists Are Allowed to Question Darwin

Surprisingly as it may be, there are some scientists who are allowed to question the theory of evolution and remain within the mianstream scientific circles. Of course, the scientists who do attack Darwin have to be careful enough to broadcast their materialistic faith nonetheless.

A good article concerning the "free pass" some materialistas have concerning the theory of evolution has been posted in "Evolution News".
Here is a snap:

We're often told that the evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution -- where unguided natural selection acting on random mutations is the driving force generating the complexity and diversity of life -- is "overwhelming." But hints of dissent from this position can be found throughout the mainstream scientific literature. One article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution last year acknowledged that there exists a "healthy debate concerning the sufficiency of neo-Darwinian theory to explain macroevolution".[1] Likewise, Günter Theißen of the Department of Genetics at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany recently wrote earlier this year in the journal Theory in Biosciences:

while we already have a quite good understanding of how organisms adapt to the environment, much less is known about the mechanisms behind the origin of evolutionary novelties, a process that is arguably different from adaptation (Wagner 2000). Despite Darwin’s undeniable merits, explaining how the enormous complexity and diversity of living beings on our planet originated remains one of the greatest challenges of biology.[2]

Even more striking criticism of what he called the "dogmatic science" of neo-Darwinian thinking can be found in a 2006 paper by Theißen, also in Theory in Biosciences:

Explaining exactly how the great complexity and diversity of life on earth originated is still an enormous scientific challenge. ... There is the widespread attitude in the scientific community that, despite some problems in detail, textbook accounts on evolution have essentially solved the problem already. In my view, this is not quite correct.[3]

What is most interesting is how these hints of dissent are often accompanied by statements disclaiming any support for intelligent design (ID), seemingly intended to help deflect attacks upon the dissenter. Theißen's 2009 article is quick to protest that "'anti-Darwinians' should not be confused with people, such as creationists, that see Darwin as their opponent,"[2] and his 2006 paper expressly disclaims any support for ID (where Theißen again inappropriately lumps with "creationism"):

There is the opposite view gaining ground mainly outside of scientific circles that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by an external intelligence – a novel version of creationism known as "Intelligent Design" (ID). A philosophical analysis of whether ID is a scientific hypothesis at all is beyond the scope of this review. In any case, its ability to develop fruitful research programs has remained negligible so far (Raff, 2005). With few exceptions (e.g., see Lönnig, 2004, and references cited therein) biologists do not consider ID helpful in our endeavour to explain life’s complexity and diversity. This does not mean, however, that we already have a complete and satisfactory theory which explains how the complexity and diversity of life originated. Thus the rejection of ID or other varieties of creationism is not based on the comprehensive explanatory power of any existing evolutionary theory, but has to be considered as an epistemological presupposition and heuristic basis of biology as a natural science.[3]

Significantly, Theißen's disclaimer admits that his rejection of ID is "not based on the comprehensive explanatory power of any existing evolutionary theory" but due to an "epistemological presupposition," namely materialism. This calls to mind Scott C. Todd's statement in Nature in 1999 that "[e]ven if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."[4]

Theißen apparently feels it necessary to announce his rejection of ID and his commitment to material explanations in order for his "anti-Darwinian" ideas to have any hope of gaining traction. Yet his 2006 paper contains a stark lamentation admitting the opposition faced by even materialists who dissent from neo-Darwinism:

It is dangerous to raise attention to the fact that there is no satisfying explanation for macroevolution. One easily becomes a target of orthodox evolutionary biology and a false friend of proponents of non-scientific concepts. According to the former we already know all the relevant principles that explain the complexity and diversity of life on earth; for the latter science and research will never be able to provide a conclusive explanation, simply because complex life does not have a natural origin.[3]

Theißen's admission is telling in that it not only recognizes it is politically "dangerous" for a materialist to question predominant evolutionary thinking (what scientist wants to "becom[e] a target of orthodox evolutionary biology"?), but also that there is even more intense opposition awaiting "friend[s] of proponents of non-scientific concepts" who believe that "complex life does not have a natural origin." If materialists face such dangers, imagine the opposition facing non-materialists seeking to have their views taken seriously in scientific journals.

Read the rest...

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Teleological Evolution and the Clash of Worldviews

An interesting post by Michael Egnor over Evolution News & Views, the Discovery Institute's group blog. He points out the "civil war" that is brewing between atheistic evolutionists and theistic evolutionists (whom he calls "accomodationalists") over the compatibility of science and religion.

We are entering an era in which a substantial and loud minority of atheist scientists and philosophers are claiming that science validates and depends on atheism and materialism. A ferocious fight has broken out in the pro-Darwinist blogosphere over this question: are philosophical naturalism and atheism essential to good science? Some of those on the side of accommodation with religion no doubt are atheists who believe that accommodation of religious beliefs is necessary for tactical reasons; others, such as Ken Miller and Francis Collins, are scientists who are Christians and who see their science as entirely compatible with their theism.

This debate is about whether worship at the materialist/atheist altar is a prerequisite for good science. My sense of it is that the accomodationists have easily gained the upper hand. The atheist insistence that science depends on and validates atheism is historically ignorant and philosophically incoherent.

That theists and open-minded agnostics and atheists on the pro-Darwinist side of this debate are finally engaging the same fundamentalist atheist dogma that intelligent design proponents have engaged for several decades is a good sign. Fundamentalist atheists are of course fighting back ferociously, because they understand, as perhaps the accomodationists don’t, the profound implications of an understanding of the natural world that is not causally closed.

Teleology is obvious in nature. Atheists and materialists intrinsically deny the reality of teleology --Aristotelian final causation-- in nature, yet nothing in the natural world can be understood without reference to teleology. Science is saturated with reference to purpose and goals of natural things. Atheists deny teleology, because acceptance of teleology in nature raises devastating questions about their atheist faith.

Fundamentalist atheists-- secular priests-- fight ferociously to extinguish challenges to their faith, because they understand that to raise the question of teleology in nature is to answer it. Atheism, for good reason, fears questions.

I could have told them that it would eventually come to this. The actual evidences for God's work of creation are all around us in nature, and people can only go for so long in ignoring them before the cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable and people have to deal with them. This is the obvious teleology in nature that Egnor references. It's also why evolutionists so often speak of evolution in teleological terms - e.g., "Evolution developed the ability for bombardier beetles to defend themselves chemically", etc. Evolutionists will unwittingly attribute to evolution independent and intelligent powers of creation - even to the point of approaching a position of atheistic "intelligent design." The reason is because the evidence of design is all around us - they can't get around it, and subconsciously will accede to it, even if consciously they try to deny it.

We need to understand that the issue of origins is not about science, per se. It is about the clash of underlying worldviews. "Evolution" is no more obvious from empirical science than is phlogiston or the aether. Both evolution and creation (as well as Intelligent Design, which really occupies a medial position) rely upon inference from forensic evidences, and hence are based upon subjective interpretation - which gets you right back to worldviews. Science, as it is commonly understood to rely upon empiricism, is completely incompetent to deal with the actual events of our origins, at least until somebody builds a time machine that actually works.

Hence, both creationism and evolutionism are dependent upon faith. This is something that creationists will readily admit, but is something that evolutionists, in their zeal to promote the fiction of the incontestability of evolution, avoid like the plague. Yet, as the article points out, hard-core evolutionists really do approach their belief system in ways that are amazing similar to religion. They have a priesthood of people like Dawkins and PZ Myers to whom they go for consolation and reassurance. They have a set of sacred scriptures which they study to firm themselves up on what they believe. They have a set of orthodox dogmas that can get you in a lot of trouble if you dissent from them. I remember years ago a discussion I had with an evolutionist on some forum somewhere. I had basically argued down every point he made, and destroyed every argument he tried to make for evolution. A few months later, I was doing some ego-googling, and came across another forum where this same fellow had gone shortly thereafter to try to reinforce himself in his evolutionism by confessing his doubts about evolution and seeking absolution for his sin from some other guy who was likely the Darwinian equivalent of a small country parish-priest. Their exchange really seemed for all the world like a confession and reinstatement to faith. It was, frankly, kind of creepy.

But that's just it - evolutionism in not science, it is not synonymous with science, nor is it necessarily always compatible with science. It is a worldview and a belief system.

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Happy 4th of July, USA!

God bless the USA, Israel (and Portugal!) ;-)

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Is It Scientifically Justifiable to Analyze the Evolution of Rape

07/18/2003 - http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev0703.htm

Many people were upset in 2000 when Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer published a book entitled The Natural History of Rape, because it seemed to rationalize violent behavior as an evolutionary adaptation of the human male psyche, rather than a moral evil. P.C. Chan, a biological anthropologist at Cambridge, expresses his views on that episode in the

July 18 issue of Science.

Chan agrees that Thornhill and Palmer deserved to be criticized, but more on the basis that their work was bad science, not so much that it is improper to analyze human behaviors in terms of evolution. In his book review of a new book edited by Cheryl Brown Travis, Evolution, Gender and Rape (MIT Press, 2003), which takes a decidedly dim view of Thornhill and Palmer’s book, Chan feels the opposition goes overboard and throws out the baby with the bathwater (emphasis added in all quotes):

The failure of Evolution, Gender, and Rape does not lie in its wholly justified critiques of A Natural History of Rape, many of which are thoughtful, excellent, and well written. Rather, having found a legitimate sociobiological target for attack, too many contributors suggest that all efforts to understand any potential for evolved propensities or tendencies in human behavior can now be dismissed--tarred with the “you support rapists” brush. Politics are applied to damn all behavioral biology, even when issues such as power and mate choice can potentially be usefully explored in a biological context. But then, as many of the contributors claim, the biological context does not exist--at least not for humans, though fruit flies are (barely) given the benefit of the doubt. Evolutionary biology sensu Thornhill and Palmer (and probably that of some of the rest of us who work with the evolution of behavior) can be cast off as merely the rewriting of the political and gendered context within which we theorize. This may indeed be valid when it comes to arguments about the “natural history” of rape, but to dismiss all such attempts as belonging to the same class of thinking does a disservice to evolutionary biology in general.

Before this conclusion, Chan made it clear he thinks Thornhill and Palmer were bad guys, guilty of “bad theory, bad analysis, bad history, and bad writing.” And he emphatically answers no to the questions, “is rape a universal ‘male behavior’? Does it need to be examined from an evolutionary perspective?” Similarly, his answer is clearly no to the question, “If a behavior exists, does it by default require a just-so story in order to be understood?” He points out that rape is a behavior of a small minority of males who are usually ostracized, and that contrary to the image of the “predatory Pleistocene male, forcibly mating with unchoosy females,” female choice is a strong force in most populations:

Females do choose. They choose “nice” mates; parental mates; healthy, vigorous, mentally alert mates--be they fruit flies, blackbirds, zebra finches, elephants, or humans. That female choice would exacerbate the violent, unpredictable, political, and thuggish tendencies of the human rapist seems unlikely at best. Female choice is thus central to many of the arguments, both biological and sociological, here. It is a pity that the book does not explore this concept for its feminist contributions.

Against this background, Chan feels much of the new book “fulminates against any attempt to explore human behavior using evolutionary theory.” He agrees that criticisms of some of the “major excesses of evolutionary psychology” are justified. Yet he is concerned that an overreaction will diminish the useful work that some sociobiologists are doing, that can help shed light on human behavior. Describing something is not the same as endorsing it. Books like Evolution, Gender, and Rape undermine legitimate sociobiological work, and “Darwin becomes the class, gender, and societal enemy of the female people.”
P.C. Chan’s book review is entitled, “EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: Reason, Rape, and Angst in Behavioral Studies.”

Female choice? What female choice? A female does not choose to be raped.
Chan is doing quick and vigorous spot-remover work. He wants evolutionary sociobiology to look spotless, free from any stains of sexism, racism, just-so storytelling, and political incorrectness. It’s interesting that Thornhill and Palmer’s book appears to have caused a reaction not just among evangelical Christians and feminists, but scientists who seem to be thinking, “This has gone too far!” A strong current of evolutionists question whether evolutionary sociobiology is valid at all.
Thus Politically Correct Chan, an evolutionary biological anthropologist, needs to work damage control, pronto. Human evolutionary sociobiology is not this dreadful, male-chauvinist, evil thing: why look, we study motherhood and apple pie. (One of his positive-spin examples is “John Bowlby’s ‘environment of adaptedness,’ a description of the dynamic process of interaction that establishes the relationship between mother and infant.”) We’re all for female choice, he says, and for “nice” mates. Don’t tar-and-feather all of us just because a few bad apples do bad work and write a bad book.
Yet the faults of evolutionary sociobiology are not spots to be removed, but the core beliefs comprising its essential fabric. If human behavior is no different in essence than that of fruit flies, blackbirds and elephants, and if we have all evolved from the same slime, two consequences ensue: (1) There is no ground for moral judgments that any behavior is wrong or evil; it is only adaptive or non-adaptive. Theoretically, therefore, rape could be an adaptive behavior for humans in some contexts. (2) There is no basis for knowing anything, because human intellectual analysis is no different in principle from chimpanzee or honeybee sensory stimulus and response. So neither Thornhill, Palmer or Chan can say that their theories about sociobiology are true. A corollary of this is that evolutionary descriptions of behavior are mere just-so storytelling.**
Notably, Chan does not dismiss rape as evil, but only as inconsequential in most populations because of the power of female choice and societal pressure. Then why be sensitive about charges of being tarred with the “you support rapists” brush? The reaction bespeaks an inner voice that says, we all know rape is evil.
The Natural History of Rape should have been a wake-up call to everybody that Darwinian thinking, at least as applied to humans, is dangerous. Thornhill and Palmer may have been culpable for poor scientific analysis and technique, but their core assumptions are no different than those of Chan, E. O. Wilson, and the contributors to Evolution, Gender, and Rape. Without a God on the throne saying Thou shalt not commit adultery and Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, or anything that is thy neighbor’s, anything goes. By granting pseudo-scientific rationalization for breaking the Ten Commandments, Darwin* becomes the class, gender, and societal enemy of not just the female people, but all the people.
*Darwin, in the sense of what his evolutionary theory has become, not the man himself.
**There they go again: Science Now just reported that a book on male transsexuals has created a firestorm between evolutionary psychologists, who praise J. Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen, and transsexuals, who say it does not portray them accurately as “women trapped in men’s bodies.” Does anybody deny that the world has gone mad?

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Desert creatures inspire ‘SandBot’

Good article in how scientists are learning from God's Design.

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Homology Does Not Prove Descent

Once again, another in a long chain of "transitional fossils" that supposedly "proves" macroevolution. Fossil Solves Mystery of Dinosaur Finger Evolution,

Bird wings clearly share ancestry with dinosaur "hands" or forelimbs. A school kid can see it in the bones. But paleontologists have long struggled to explain the so-called digit dilemma.

Here's the problem: The most primitive dinosaurs in the famous theropod group (that later included Tyrannosaurus rex) had five "fingers." Later theropods had three, just like the birds that evolved from them. But which digits? The theropod and bird digits failed to match up if you number the digits from 1 to 5 starting with the thumb. Theropods looked like they had digits 1, 2 and 3, while birds have digits 2, 3 and 4.

That mismatch failed to support the widely accepted evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.

Now, newly described fossilized hands from a beaked, plant-eating dinosaur, called Limusaurus inextricabilis, reveal a transitional step in the evolution of modern wings from dino digits. The finding could resolve a debate over which fingers ultimately became embedded in the wing.

In case anyone is interested, you can see a photo of the dinosaur's hand.

First, the hand. Look, let's be honest here. The same kind of thinking that leads palaeontologists to reconstruct entire proto-human skeletons on the basis of a couple of bones from an extinct peccary is what leads them to assume the presence of a "vestigial first finger" in L. inextricabilis. The thinking in question is called "wishful thinking", and has led many a palaeontologist down the wrong path with all kinds of other supposed "transitional fossils."

More to the point, however, is the unquestioned assumption that homology implies phylogeny - in other words, because two structures look similar, then they must be related. In this type of case, biologists usually assume that if structures between two creatures look homologous, then this must mean that either one is descended from the other, or they are descended from a common ancestor. By that logic, then this,



and




must be evolutionarily related. After all, they're both tall, they look similar, they have hollowed out spaces in their interiors, creatures live in them, etc.

Ridiculous, of course, but then again, so is this current claim about dinosaur hands as they relate to birds' wings. We don't know which dinosaur fingers evolved into those found in birds' wings, but some of them must have, otherwise our theories won't work anymore. That's called "proving the evidence by the theory", which is the opposite of what science is supposed to be about. The assumption of phylogeny from homology in this case, as with other "transition fossils" (like the much ballyhoed Tiktaalik) is entirely gratuitous. There's no reason for it, other than to make the data fit an a priori assumption about phylogeny. And quite frankly, the claim of "homology" (i.e. that the bones in birds' wings and dinosaur hands are structurally similar) in this case is....imaginative....at best.

Homology does not prove the transitional nature of this fossil, despite the claims of the article. From a strictly empirical viewpoint, homology - at best - can suggest that similar structures may be present in different species to perform similar functions. Homology does NOT disprove special creation, either. God is certainly free to have used similar designs across different species, if He intended. That's not a scientific argument, you say? True. But neither is the a priori assumption that evolution must have taken place, so it's okay to fit the data to the theory, instead of vice versa.

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Fossil Graveyards: the elephant in the living room

Have you ever been in a situation in which you and other people were talking about something, and everyone knew that there was something relating to that subject you and others were not suposed to mention? Evolutionists must feel that way when it comes to fossil graveyards.

Fossil graveyards happen when a large collection of fossils is found in the same place. The weirdness of such places is that sometimes the animals you find in there don't even live in the same habbit.

Another "weird thing" is that sometimes you find many whale fossils buried in such place. How do you fossilize one whale, let alone dozens of others, in the same place?

Everyone realizes that a catastrophic event is at the root of such fossil graveyards. The problem for evolutionists is that the Holy Bible mentions one worldwide catastrophic event that caused the death of the majority of land animals, and the vast majority of humans.

Knowing the Biblical conotations of such graveyard relics, and how a world wide flood totally destroys the mythical "million of years" needed for evolution, atheists and old earthers in general have to try to find another non-world-wide-flood explination. Usually it comes down to "We know it wasn't a major world wide catastrophy, but we don't know what it was!"

See, evolutionists live by faith.

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The Evolution of Tickling

[Just when you thought this theory couldn't get even sillier, we get this gem. Try not to laugh as you read it, ok? This is science!! ]

http://creationsafaris.com/crev200906.htm#20090608a

June 8, 2009 — Observation: orangutans seem to laugh when tickled. Conclusion: humans evolved laughter from our ape past. This is the story being promoted by the science news outlets. “At least 10 million years ago, our ancestors may have been laughing it up over the latest stone-age prank or bout of tickling,” announced Live Science.

New Scientist joined in the laugh fest, saying “Laughter is not uniquely human.... laughter dates back some 10 to 16 million years, to our common ancestor.” Science Daily aped this story, and as did the BBC News and Nature News. National Geographic was tickled with it and even included sound recordings so you could hear the laughter of a bonobo, chimp, gorilla, orangutan and a human child.

Each of these articles was accompanied by pictures of apes making funny faces – something that should have been known since the old Bonzo movies. None of the studies claims, though, that the apes laughed at the shaggy man joke.

National Geographic wins Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week for these punch lines:

But even the most casual listener can tell a human laugh from an ape laugh. Davila Ross points out that human laughter has distinct differences from ape laughter, most likely because humans have evolved much more rapidly than apes during the past five million years.
And at least one great mystery remains: What purpose does ape laughter serve?....
Primates have apparently packed a lot of laughter into the last 10 to 16 million years, but there’s a chance the chuckle originated even earlier: Tickle-induced “laughter” has also been reported in rats.
The idea remains controversial, but it could suggest that our funny bone evolved much closer to the trunk of mammals’ evolutionary tree.

Maybe those squeaks are funnier than people thought. But why stop with mammals? Parakeets seem to tell jokes to each other. Jungles are filled with screeches and whoops that might be interpreted as one big comedy show.

Isn’t The World’s Funniest Animals one of the most popular shows on Animal Planet? Robert Roy Britt extended the possibility of laughter to cats and dogs on MSNBC News but seemed to recognize a limit to interpreting the results: “Just because a bee buzzes, that doesn’t mean it’s laughing at you.”

So this is modern science at work: tickling animals to study the evolution of laughter. Suggestion: don’t try this on grizzly bears.

The storytelling continues (see 11/22/2005). It’s an endless joke at our expense. Don’t be surprised if one of them looks for the laughter gene in bacteria. Maybe these scientists should analyze why common-sensical people are laughing at them for taking themselves seriously.

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Birds Didn’t Evolve from Dinosaurs

Original Link

June 9, 2009 — “The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.” That statement is not being made by creationists, but by science reporters describing work at Oregon State University that cast new doubt on the idea that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs. The main idea: their leg bones and lungs are too different.

Science Daily’s report has a diagram of the skeleton showing how the fixed femur is tied into the avian lung system. Birds use more oxygen than mammals.

Their flow-through lungs would collapse if the femur moved like it does in mammals, reptiles and dinosaurs. “It’s really strange that no one realized this before,” said Devon Quick, professor of zoology at OSU, speaking of the tie-in of the femur to the bird lung. “The position of the thigh bone and muscles in birds is critical to their lung function, which in turn is what gives them enough lung capacity for flight.”

His colleague John Ruben was equally surprised: “It’s really kind of amazing that after centuries of studying birds and flight we still didn’t understand a basic aspect of bird biology.” The article began, “The conclusions add to other evolving evidence that may finally force many paleontologists to reconsider their long-held belief that modern birds are the direct descendants of ancient, meat-eating dinosaurs.” Key paragraphs put this in context:

“For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from,” Ruben said. “That’s a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories.
“But one of the primary reasons many scientists kept pointing to birds as having descended from dinosaurs was similarities in their lungs,“ Ruben said. “However, theropod dinosaurs had a moving femur and therefore could not have had a lung that worked like that in birds. Their abdominal air sac, if they had one, would have collapsed. That undercuts a critical piece of supporting evidence for the dinosaur-bird link.
“A velociraptor did not just sprout feathers at some point and fly off into the sunset,” Ruben said.

For a claim dinosaurs had air sacs, see the 09/29/2008 entry. The OSU professors are not disbelieving in evolution. Birds and dinosaurs may have had a more distant common ancestor, they said: “It just seems pretty clear now that birds were evolving all along on their own and did not descend directly from the theropod dinosaurs, which lived many millions of years later.”
Oregon State has been at the forefront of challenging the dogma: “OSU research on avian biology and physiology was among the first in the nation to begin calling into question the dinosaur-bird link since the 1990s.” Doubts have also been raised at other institutions. Why has the story persisted? For one, “old theories die hard, Ruben said, especially when it comes to some of the most distinctive and romanticized animal species in world history.” Another reason is museum politics:

“Frankly, there’s a lot of museum politics involved in this, a lot of careers committed to a particular point of view even if new scientific evidence raises questions,” Ruben said. In some museum displays, he said, the birds-descended-from-dinosaurs evolutionary theory has been portrayed as a largely accepted fact, with an asterisk pointing out in small type that “some scientists disagree.”
“Our work at OSU used to be pretty much the only asterisk they were talking about,” Ruben said. “But now there are more asterisks all the time. That’s part of the process of science.”

That being the case, we can expect heated comeback arguments from those committed to the dominant view. Nevertheless, they will have to contend with the problem of evolving a fixed femur from dinosaurs who had a moving one – and in a shorter time than the fossil evidence allows.
The new work was published in the Journal of Morphology and was funded by the National Science Foundation, the article said. This story was also reported by PhysOrg and E! Science News. Time will tell if the other major science reporters pick it up. As of June 10, they did not, but Astrobiology Magazine did.

Sometimes the key to a story is in the asterisks. The OSU professors should be commended for going against a strong current of dogma in their field. Notice how many non-evidential factors producing that dogma were pointed out in the article: careers on the line, museum politics, romanticized notions, and old die-hard theories presented as fact. Those are the same non-evidential factors running rampant throughout King Charles’ domain. He’s the one that needs to go flying off into the sunset – with velocity.
The OSU profs saved their skin, though, by still pinching their incense to Caesar, claiming that the mythical “common ancestor” is just a little further back in the record, and that birds were “evolving in parallel” along with the dinosaurs. That’s all they can do – toss in a few more naturalistic, purposeless, chance miracles to keep the Bearded Buddha shrine operating. Now the museum workers are going to have to figure out what to do with all those feathers (01/21/2009, 07/09/2008, 06/13/2007, 02/08/2006). Maybe they can stick them on the wooly mammoths, as caricatured by Tom Weller in Science Made Stupid, a mandatory lesson on how evolutionary stories are propagated.

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James von Brunn and Charles Johnson Have Something in Common

David Klinghoffer, who blogs over at Beliefnet, notices something interesting about the Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn - he's a rabid evolutionist fanboy.

Now isn't this fascinating. James von Brunn, the white-supremacist suspect in today's Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting in which the guard who was shot has now tragically died, describes the relevance of evolution to his sick thinking. He's obsessed with "genetics." He writes in his manifesto (emphasis added):


Approval of inter-racial breeding is predicated on idiotic Christian dogma that God's children must love their enemies (a concept JEWS totally reject); and on LIBERAL/MARXIST/JEW propaganda that all men/races are created equal. These genocidal ideologies, preached from the American pulpits, taught in American schools, legislated in the halls of Congress (confirming TALMUDIC conviction that goyim are stupid sheep), are expected to produce a single, superintelligent, beautiful, non-White "American" population. Eliminating forever racism, inequality, bigotry and war. As with ALL LIBERAL ideologies, miscegenation is totally inconsistent with Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool while increasing the number of physiologically, psychologically and behaviorally deprived mongrels. Throughout history improvident Whites have miscegenated. The "brotherhood" concept is not new (as LIBERALS pretend) nor are the results -- which are inevitably disastrous for the White Race -- evident today, for example, in the botched populations of Cuba, Mexico, Egypt, India, and the inner cities of contemporary America.


This wacko despises Christianity, too, though not quite as much as he does Judaism. Like Hitler in Mein Kampf, he draws lessons from his interpretation of Darwinism. He's very big on dangers to the Aryan "gene pool." The subtitle of his book promies: "A New Hard-Hitting Exposé Of The JEW CONSPIRACY To Destroy The White Gene-Pool."

Of course, Charles Johnson at LGF 1.0 is desperately trying to spin his way around this inconvenient fact. Spin it, baby.

Let's face it - James von Brunn was a leftist. We know from his own twisted writings that he hates Jews, Christians, Israel, "neo-cons", Bush, McCain, Fox News, globalisation, the Weekly Standard, and Bill O'Reilly. Despite all of this, the media and their enablers are still trying to run with the "right wing wacko" line, since, you know, von Brunn was a Neo-Nazi, and we all know that they're right-wingers!

Except that they're not.

Fascists, whether neo- or not, were and are supports of huge government statism. Hitler wanted to upend traditional German Christian society, and he was big on social spending and other accoutrements of the Left. Today's British National Party are avowed socialists as far as their domestic program ideas are concerned. Most Neo-Nazis since the 1980s have been on the Left - indeed, Leftists are and have been unwitting fellow travellers of the Neo-Nazi movement for decades.

People have remarked about how the case of von Brunn confuses the "left-right" dichotomy in politics. No, it doesn't. There is nothing rightist about von Brunn to begin with. Hating Jews is a leftist thing. While I am very saddened for the family of the guard who was shot and killed, this event has nevertheless had the unintended positive consequence of causing a goodly number of people out there to begin to question the tired old media meme of "right-wing extremists." Turns out the Neo-Nazis are LEFT-wing extremists who often sound like they could be writing for Daily Kos or the Huffington Post.

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Has-been jazz guitarist to pro-lifers: It's all your fault

As it was expected from the on going rethoric of Darwinst Rage Boy, pro-lifers are to be blamed for every single man claiming to be a pro-life who kills another man. In Darwin Boy's logic, being against abortion somehow generates abortion killers. I guess it's like being against creationism generates creationist-killers, right Charles?

But as we’ve shown here at LGF ["we"?? You mean YOU ALONE, right Darwin Boy?], Roeder also posted comments at anti-abortion websites, subscribed to anti-abortion magazines (including one that advocated the murder of doctors who perform abortions), and when he was arrested he had a Post-It note in his car containing the phone number of Operation Rescue. Exactly how do you qualify to have “connections to the pro-life” movement, if this doesn’t do it?

huh, by the simple fact that the pro-life movement doesn't endorse the killing of abortionists as a measure to stop abortions. (That wasn't hard to grasp, was it?) Name one oficial pro-life movement that defends the killing of abortionists.

Being pro-life means being PRO-LIFE, including the life of the abortionist. There is nothing in being pro-life that justifies the killing of eugenicist "doctors". The fact that some nutjobs walk among us and go about killing abortionists (something that is condemned by all major pro-life organizations) should not be as "evidence" that the movement itself endorses killing abortionists. But I guess that for someone who can't see the design in the living world, seeing the facts without the "religion is evil!" glasses must be hard.

Note to anti-abortion groups: man up and take responsibility for Scott Roeder.

Right after you evolutionists take responsiblity for 6 million dead jews, Ota Benga, the killing of australians (seen as the "missing links"), the killing of millions of unborn babies, the cirurgical castration of "undesirables", Margaret Sanger (the liberal evolutionist woman who created Planned Parenthood as means to "exterminate the negro population"), and many other things that social DARWINISM brought to society.

When will you darwinists take responsibility for that?

As for pro-lifers taking responsibility for Roeder: sure. We will take it when he does something that is in agreement with our values and purposes. Meanwhile, we deflect your "note" and sent him back to you.

Obviously, not everyone who belongs to a “pro-life” group will go to such extreme lengths as Scott Roeder apparently did, but it’s long past time for you folks to start dialing down the rhetoric and acting more responsibly — before anyone else is hurt or killed in a shooting or an abortion clinic bombing.

There is no need to "dial down the rethoric". Our rethoric works very well. Too bad that not everyone who claims to be one of us doesn't act in agreement with what we believe.

I guess it's people like you who should take responsibility for other humans taking the law into their hands. Roeder's actions are more in line with those who think that morality is decided by humans rather then those who know that morality is decided by God.

Nice try in trying to blame ALL the pro-life movement for the actions of those who act against the purposes of the movement. Nice try, I repeat, but it doesn't work.

One more thing: Since when you get your talking points from Andrew Sullivan, the ultra-liberal?

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Moral advices from has-been jazz guitarist

It's a crazy world when someone who bans people for disagreeing with him thinks that he has the authority to give moral advices to pro-lifers. Does Darwinist Rage Boy actually live in his own bubble or does he expect people to have a short memory?

Abortionist "Dr" George "Mengele" Tiller has been killed by what seems to be a pro-lifer. Pro-life organizations universily condemned the attack with no "buts" or "ifs", as muslims do when one of their own brother comits (yet another) terror attack. However, as it is saddly normal, there are people from the pro-life movement (which, by the way, seems to be a movement whose views is shared by the majority of americans) who will act silly and inhumane.

In the best interess of Tiller's family, the pro-lifers should not gloat over the death of the abortionist. It's a good thing that he won't be killing anymore babies, but I wish he had stopped on hiw own accord and not from his death. The abortionist is facing eternal judgement right now, so justice is done. We should, however, be very careful with words because liberals like has-been jazz guitarist will cling to those words and malign all the pro-life enterprise. Look at what he says:

Shame on all you people who are gloating and partying over a murder that took place inside a church. And you call yourselves “Christians?” What the hell is wrong with you?

First of all, mr has-been jazz guitarrist, who are you to point the finger? Aren't you the one who bans people for the "sin" of not sharing your liberal views? Secondly, where were you when "Dr" Tiller was murdering innocent babies? Who died and made you a moral authority to judge Christian behaviour?

Let me make this clear: I hope that the man who killed "Dr" Tiller is tried and convicted for killing a human being, however I don't think that pro-abortion liberals have the moral authority to point the finger at anyone.

One more thing: since, suposedly, we are the result of an (unproven) evolutionary process, and not from the creative act of God, what makes your moral decisions better than the moral decisions of the guy who killed the hell-bound abortionist? If there is no God, everyone's moral decisions are equally valid since there is no absolute way to determine right from wrong, apart from our own personal, subjective opinions.

Come off your high horse, has-been jazz guitarist. You don't have the authority to point the finger at anyone.

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Someone Made a Monkey Out of Charles Johnson

The past couple of weeks have been really bad for Charles Johnson. He’s been schooled on a number of things, not least of which was his drinking of the DHS “veterans are a bunch of potential terrorists” Koolaid which blew up in his face. Well, looks like something else has gone a little sour for him – this one being the “evolutionary missing link” that was unveiled with much fanfare late last week. Charles, of course, was ecstatic. Here was his chance to validate his blog’s existence – much needed since LGF 1.0 began its ever-quickening slide into irrelevancy. Here was his chance to rub it in the faces of those mean, stinky ol’ creationists who had done so much damage his Alexa rating by forcing him to ban them for disagreeing with him. Charles linked to the article about the original discovery, eschewing post-quote commentary, which seems to be his way of projecting an air of self-satisfied vindication on some question.



Charles began ever-so-slightly to backtrack a few days ago, linking to a blog post at the New York Times which was lamenting the “rock star” mentality with which “Ida” (so the fossilized lemur is named) was being approached, via press conferences and whatnot. Commenting on the post, Charles had this to say,

“I understand the consternation scientists feel when they see these kinds of public relations techniques being used; it may be the first time a media event like this has been staged to promote a scientific discovery. But as long as the science is good — and in this case, the team of researchers worked on the fossil for two years before going public, and did publish a paper in the journal PLoS One — I can’t get upset over the PR push.”

In retrospect, Charles should have noticed the warning signs – when actual scientists didn’t share his enthusiasm for the widespread media coverage, he should have known something was up. Indeed, some of these scientists were worried because it appeared even then that Ida wasn’t quite what she was being sold as. Yet, Charles and his crew persevered onward, as did others in the left-leaning-but-pretending-to-be-right-leaning blogosphere with a vested interested in peddling evolution. For instance, Hot Air’s Allah Pundit opined,

”Well, a missing link, not necessarily the missing link, although insofar as it seems to confirm Darwin’s speculation about transitional species, it’s a huge coup for fans of Uncle Charlie. I love the smell of fossilized monkeys in the morning. Smells like … victory. If anyone needs me, I’ll be at the bar drinking champagne with Charles Johnson.”

Very cute, but also very pre-mature.



Today, Charles’ latest installment in the soap opera that is Ida was handed down over at 1.0. Charles linked to this article at OneNewsNow - 'Ida' an extinct primate - and that's all



Charles quotes from Ken Ham,

The ministry has stated: “Because the fossil is similar to a modern lemur (a small, tailed, tree-climbing primate), it’s unlikely that creationists need any interpretation of the ‘missing link’ other than that it was a small, tailed, probably tree-climbing, and now extinct primate — from a kind created on Day 6 of Creation Week.

and then comments,

Aren’t you glad that’s settled?

Because, hey, simply pointing out that Ida looks almost exactly like a modern lemur shouldn’t be a reason to call the veracity of evolutionist assumptions about the fossil into question or anything.



Yet, for reasons not necessarily all that dissimilar from Ham’s on a technical level, it seems that several specialists in the requisite fields are more or less agreeing with him that Ida is far from proof of a “missing link” between anything, and that it might indeed just be a dead animal, and nothing more.

”A fossil skeleton touted as a "revolutionary scientific find that will change everything" was unveiled today at a press conference in New York City. With Mayor Michael Bloomberg and filmmakers in attendance, an international team of researchers introduced the world to "Ida," the skeleton of a primate that, the team claims, may be a missing link between primitive primates and humans. But many experts aren't so enthusiastic. "It's an extraordinarily complete, wonderful specimen, but it's not telling us too much that we didn't know before," says paleoanthropologist Elwyn Simons of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina….



“Many paleontologists are unconvinced. They point out that Hurum and Gingerich's analysis compared 30 traits in the new fossil with primitive and higher primates when standard practice is to analyze 200 to 400 traits and to include anthropoids from Egypt and the newer fossils of Eosimias from Asia, both of which were missing from the analysis in the paper. "There is no phylogenetic analysis to support the claims, and the data is cherry-picked," says paleontologist Richard Kay, also of Duke University. Callum Ross, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois agrees: "Their claim that this specimen should be classified as haplorhine is unsupportable in light of modern methods of classification."

Yeah, what he said.


Certainly, even by the evolutionists own criteria, the science supporting the “missing link-ness” of Ida is shoddy. This despite the fact that a few days ago, Charles Johnson was assuring us that the “science was good”, since, by gum, scientists had been working on it for two whole years, and it was published in a scientific journal!

Someone forgot to tell Charles that, as with the internet, you shouldn’t believe everything you read in scientific journals. Once again, we see Charles jumping on a bandwagon he thinks will vindicate and validate him, without fully understanding what it is that he’s stumping for.

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Rush Limbaugh Hates Science!

Well, it seems that old Rushie has fallen from grace in Chuckles' dictionary.

Not being content in attacking pretty much every conservative figure there is (Jindal, Coulter, Glenn Beck, etc), the aging adolescent, has-been jazz guitarrist, Charles Johnson aka "Darwinist Rage Boy" is now angry at Rush Limbaugh. Rush's crime? Not worshipping Darwin.

As I think everyone knows, there has been a huge (darwinian) hype about a lemur fossil found in Germany, and nicknamed as "Ida". To make the story short, it's just a fossil of an animal that looks like modern lemurs. Nothing more nothing less.

Not for darwinists, of course. For darwinists this is the evidence they have been praying for. (Well, not praying, since they usually don't believe in a Personal God)

Rush Limbaugh, like any sane person, is skeptical of this (yet another) "missing link". Charles, who cannot accept that people don't believe that the world created itself, fumes and says:

It’s just pathetic that on a day when such an amazing scientific discovery is announced, possibly one of the greatest finds of all time, Rush Limbaugh gets on the radio and tells his millions of admirers that it’s meaningless bullshit.

Well , first of all, it's not "one of the greatest finds of all time". It's just a freaking fossil, for crying out loud.

Secondly, it is meaningless when we look at what it is suposed to confirm. The theory that postulates that the living world is the result of an undirected natural process, as opposed to intelligent design, is not "confirmed" when we find fossils of extinct animals. Where is the mechanism able to turn this animal into something other than itself? How do we know that this animal burried in there left any offspring? The hype around Ida is more religious fervor than empirical science.

This should be a day when all Americans — all human beings — are proud of what we can accomplish through science and research, and human intelligence. Discoveries like “Ida” happen once in a lifetime.

Hilarious. Notice the on going "boogey man" mentality displayed by Chuckles Johnson aka Darwinist Rage Boy, aka Icarus the Kid: if you deny that those bones are your great great great grandparents, then you hate ALL science. It never dawns on Darwin Boy's mentality that perhaps (perhaps) it is because of "science and research" that people don't buy the Darwian nonsense.

Right wing extremist Savage wrote a worthy article about the Darwin-Ida-Charles Johnson affair.

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Creatures that Defy Evolution - Part 1/3

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StopTheACLU to Charles: Sit Down, Chuckie!

Original Article

Dude has seriously become as wacky as the posters at Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, and Firedoglake. The consistent “let’s abuse those who do not believe in Darwinism and call them all Creationists” posts, the constant ones about the fascists in Europe which are meant to be attacks against Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, and a few others, and his moronic posts regarding the DHS right wing extremists documents, which proved that he either did not get the issue, or was a complete barking moonbat. Now, we get

Alan Keyes Arrested At Notre Dame With Radical Anti-Abortion Activist

Interestingly, that is almost the same language that the DHS report used, calling those who are anti-abortion right wing extremists, simply for being against abortion on demand. It’s also the same type of language that the pro-abortion folks use to attempt to paint those who are against baby killing as “outside the mainstream.”

Not one of these people uttered a word of protest when Notre Dame University tried to bring radical Islamist Tariq Ramadan to the school, to make him chairman of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

Perhaps that wasn’t their issue, Chuckles. It used to be yours. Maybe you could add the old graphicback, the one where the green football is attacking a Muslim extremist holding what looks like a human shield, and become a leader in the anti-Islamist movement again.

But Tariq Ramadan is in favor of the death penalty for homosexuals, so maybe they have that much in common.

Nice ad-hominem attack, painting all who are anti-baby killing as wanting the death penalty for homosexuals. Interestingly, this partisan screed comes in the same week we find out that a majority of American’s are now pro-life, and Norma McCorvey, the Roe in Roe v. Wade, is taking Obama, and Notre Dame, to task.

Over at blogmocracy, otherwise known as Little Green Footballs 2.0, Another Heartbreak for LGF: Most Americans Are Pro Life

LGF is really having a bad week, 1st the DHS memo was withdrawn which Icarus really defended. Now the myth that social conservatism is hurting the GOP has been exposed as a lie. I wonder how the “progressives” at LGF will spin this? They probably will ignore it since it shatters their beliefs..

(PS: this post is completely the work of myself, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the owner of Stop The ACLU or any other posters, so, if anyone wants to go off on someone, go off on me.)

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Conservatives have no problems with real science

In his latest attacks against the voices who refuse to worship Darwin, Charles "Darwinist Rage Boy" Johnson reveals his knowledge (or lackthere of) concerning the issue "darwin versus design". I got tired of having him spew the same mantra over and over again, so I decide to make a short post about some of the things he says.

but “intelligent design” creationism has absolutely no legitimacy as a scientific theory

Depends on how you define "scientific theory", Darwinist Rage Boy. If you define "science" as the enterprise which denies a priori any Inteligent Causation for the biosfere, then yes, ID is against "science". However, if by science you mean "knowledge", then ID is a much more robust scientific theory than the theory of evolution.

There isn’t a single peer-reviewed paper that supports it

Oh really? What about these, Darwin Boy? Or what about the article authored by Dr Stephen Meyer, which caused darwinists to go insane? It had peer review, as Dr Richard Sternberg says on his site, but even so, since it advocated ID, darwinists didn't like it one bit.

So what do you mean with "there isn't a single peer reviewd paper that suports it", when there are some around?

there are no reputable scientists who promote it

Who defines what makes a scientist "reputable" or not? The darwinists? Is Scott Minich a "reputable" scientist?

and the most famous (actually, the only) biologist identified with ID, Michael Behe

This is the kind of statement that makes Darwinist Rage Boy look childish.

So in all the world, the only biologist who advocates an Inteligent Cause behind the design in the living world is Michael Behe? What about Jonathan Wells, who has degrees in Biology too? Perhaps he is not a "reputable biologist", right Charlie?

To end, here is another precious gem

This is why so many people believe the GOP has a problem with science — because it does.

Who are those "people"? Liberals? It wouldn't be the same people who advocate global warming, abortion and embrionic steem cell research, would it?

The truth of the matter is that conservatives have no problems with science, but only with naturalism. Darwinist Rage Boy conflates the two as if those are one and the same.

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Most Americans are Pro Life

Original Link

LGF has been attacking and smearing social conservatives. The theory that is popular at progressive blogs like LGF, is that GOP is in trouble because of issues like abortion. Well, here is a big heartbreak for Kid Icarus and other progressives; a majority of Americans are now pro-life!
More Americans “Pro-Life” Than “Pro-Choice” for First Time

PRINCETON, NJ — A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.

The new results, obtained from Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002.

This debunks the myth that it is the GOP’s pro-life stance that is hurting the party. If anything it may be one of the few things keeping the party on life support.

LGF is really having a bad week, 1st the DHS memo was withdrawn which Icarus really defended. Now the myth that social conservatism is hurting the GOP has been exposed as a lie. I wonder how the “progressives” at LGF will spin this? They probably will ignore it since it shatters their beliefs.

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Why in the World Was I Banned from Little Green Footballs?

From this article.

In case many of you don't know, Little Green Footballs is a Right-leaning blog run by Charles Johnson. It focuses mainly on radical Islam, but no topic appears to be off limits. Lately, he has focused heavily on Evolution, why Intelligent Design should not be taught in schools, why Ron Paul is a racist, why Glenn Beck is crazy and the prevalence of Fascism in Europe.

When I was blogging exclusively for Copious Dissent a few months ago, Charles linked to my posts. One time he linked to my discussion about Evolution, another time he linked to my analysis of an Indiana University Study. In fact, LGF is still a permanent link on Copious Dissent.

Not only has Charles approved my material in the past, but his audience loves my content as well.

The way I know that Charles' audience loves my content is because Charles added a spinoff link section to all his posts, which I routinely linked to Copious Dissent and some YouTube videos. (Ironically, this feature led me to nominate LGF for Right Wing News' best blog design award). While most links in the spinoff link section receive at most a +10 rating, I have received a link rating as high as +93, and several above +50. In short, I was a regular guest on LGF, and anyone who cared to follow the LGF links would have known me to be a regular guest.

This of course makes me wonder why my "Devil's Advocate" account was banned from LGF.

It all started yesterday when Charles made a post lamenting that Ron Paul was becoming mainstream. Evidently, Ron Paul proposed HR 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, a bill that would launch an audit of the Federal Reserve System, and which has attracted 112 co-sponsors. When Paul introduced the Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act just two years ago, no other members of Congress signed on.

Aside from linking to a New Republic article, arguing that Ron Paul is a closet racist and open conspiracy nut, Charles went one-step further. He called Ron Paul's economic theories "weird," and appeared to complain that Paul's economic theories are gaining traction. The latter is where I differ with Charles.

Let me first say that I didn't vote for Ron Paul; I voted for Mitt Romney. Had Fred Thompson or Rudy still been in the race, I would have voted for them. Then I would have voted for Mike Huckabee. In my opinion, Ron Paul should not have been President.

Nevertheless, had we had 435 Ron Pauls in the House of Representatives for the last 30 years, we would have a balanced budget and be in great economic shape. In fact, Ron Paul is right on almost everything when it comes to economics.

This led me to write the following message to Charles in the comments:

Charles, I think you need to elaborate better on this. I didn't vote for Ron Paul; I didn't agree with his foreign policy. I didn't approve of Lew Rockwell's racism. But, one thing that Ron Paul has been right about is economics.In essence, Ron Paul stands for Capitalism, No Bailouts, Free Trade. I stand for all those things.

This issue with the Fed, is based on the Austrian theory of the Business cycle, understood by F.A. Hayek and Ludvig Von Mises. Essentially, it is the idea that price controls always create misallocation of resources, so why do we accept the Federal Reserve setting "price controls" on our money via interest rates.

I think you need to explain why you're against Ron Paul's economic policies on paper, because he happens to be right on those narrow issues.

Subsequently, some people attacked me for ignoring Ron Paul's Gold Standard support. I responded by citing three books that are instructive on the Gold Standard, including Milton Friedman's Money Mischief, Thomas E. Woods, Jr.'s Meltdown and Ludwig Von Mises essays for the Gold Standard.

While I am not for the Gold Standard...yet, nor abolishing the Federal Reserve...yet, there are very legitimate arguments for the Gold Standard and abolishing the Fed that do no include Alex Jones' conspiracies. While most people would be ready to revolt if Barack Obama called for price controls on oil, we seem to be completely okay with the Fed. setting "price controls" on our money via interest rates below market value.

Moreover, since every reputable economist understands that poor Federal Reserve policy caused the Great Depression and contributed to much of the recent economic climate, some argue to let the free market via gold set the price of our money. In fact, I argued it wouldn't take long for the prices to correct themselves just like any other commodity once the system was set up.

Again, I'm not advocating this yet, but it is important to understand the arguments because many of them are valid, and I didn't even touch the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle. At the very least, transparency of the Federal Reserve is a good idea, which Ron Paul supports.

But, all this was just too much for Charles I guess. As soon as I started the debate, Charles banned me saying,

"Now I get it. 'Devil's Advocate' is the fifth sock puppet you've registered at LGF. Get off my website."

It is my understanding that a "sock puppet" is a fake account used for hateful messages.

As I mentioned above, and you can follow my links, I have been a regular on LGF, and clearly not a "sock puppet." Yes, I had registered two accounts on LGF for my friends on my computer a long, long time ago because Charles only opens registration at random times. But, I never made comments with those accounts. Either way, what Charles said was patently false, and wouldn't explain why Charles had linked to my content knowing I was a "sock puppet."

In fact, I only got in two other disagreements with Charles in the past. One time I disagreed with Charles that Glenn Beck is just as bad as Janeane Garofalo. Another time I defended George Will when Charles attacked him for citing faulty sources dealing with Global Warming.

After my banning, I sent Charles three emails hoping that he would remove the ban. He didn't respond via email. Instead he wrote the following in the comments:

"Anyone who wants to defend Ron Paul's insanity needs to explain why he is a frequent guest on the Alex Jones conspiracy show, gave the keynote speech for the John Birch Society's 50th anniversary meeting last year, and took money from the neo-Nazis at Stormfront and refused to return it when it was revealed.And that's just scratching the surface of the problems with this guy. He's a creationist, he's connected with the hardcore extreme right paleocons at the Robert Taft Club, and much, much more."

And this.

The reality is that almost no reputable economists believe the gold standard is a viable basis for a modern economic system. One of the main causes of the Great Depression, in fact, was ... the gold standard. If we ever had a government that tried to re-establish the gold standard, our current economic troubles would look like a walk in the park. It's a recipe for global disaster.And the idea of abolishing the Federal Reserve is nearly as crazy.

Well, in fact many reputable economists believed the gold standard is viable and necessary, including F.A. Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises (what lightweights I might add), and the Federal Reserve caused the great depression...not gold.

So, I know this is a long post, but I think I understand the rules of LGF now:

1) Don't ever support Ron Paul's economic policies, even if you don't support Ron Paul;

2) Don't ever support Glenn Beck;

3) Don't ever support Michele Bachmann;

4) Don't ever support someone who believes in Creationism even if you yourself believe in Evolution; and

5) Don't ever question Charles even if you supported him for 2 years.

You will be banned!

Tags:

• Charles Johnson


• Little Green Footballs

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The Designer Apparently Designs Like Humans Do

Here at UD we’ve heard over and over again that unless we “know” who the Designer is, then we can’t infer design. For example, if we were to argue that we’ve never seen the ancient Native Americans who fashioned arrowheads from stone, yet we are able to infer design in arrowheads nonetheless, the Darwinian side would respond saying, “Yes, but that’s because the Native Americans are humans like ourselves.”

PhysOrg.com has an article about the microRNA, miR-7, which has been found to regulate a network which brings about uniformity among humans. The article is interesting in itself, but most interesting is this comment by one of the lead authors, Richard W. Carthew:

When something is changed, say the genetic sequence of a molecule or the temperature of the organism, the network responds to compensate for the change and keep things intact. . . . This design is similar to the principle that engineers use to design safety features into products.”

Unless some Darwinist can mount some kind of sensible objection, then I guess we here at UD can safely, and reasonably, conclude that whoever the Designer is, he ‘designs’ like human engineers do. Thusly, the opposite is true: if we find human engineering-like design in biological systems, then we can conclude that we have encountered the/a Designer. And Darwinists can kindly drop this type of argument from their repetoire.

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Are Secular Geologists Ready to Consider a Global Flood?

http://creationsafaris.com/crev200904.htm#20090430a

30, 2009 — Everyone knows the Bible tells the story of a global flood in Noah’s day. Creation scientists argue that its effects would have left visible evidence today – including most of the sedimentary layers and most of the fossil record. Secular geologists have laughed off this story since the 18th century as nothing but myth, of course, but a paper in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences suggests that some of them are re-evaluating the role of “megafloods” in earth history. Some megafloods might be considered as “global planetary phenomena.”

Author Victor R. Baker was not thinking of Noah but of a more recent fellow, J Harlen Bretz (see 07/25/2008). In his paper, “The Channeled Scabland: A Retrospective” in the May 2009 Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences,¹ he retold the story of the brave geologist who bucked the established and proposed an “outrageous hypothesis” for the scarred landscape of eastern Washington state.

His 1927 proposal that an ice-age megaflood scoured the extensive channel network in a matter of days was met with scorn and derision. Baker wrote, “the geological community largely resisted his bold hypothesis for decades, despite an enthusiastic, eloquent defense thereof” – Bretz was finally vindicated in the 1960s and his theory is the new consensus.

Baker clearly states the reason for the rejection of Bretz’s hypothesis. Geologists would not even consider such extensive processes, because their worldview assumptions could not accommodate them:

The prolonged nature of the Spokane Flood controversy arose in part because of the adherence of many geologists to substantive and epistemological presumptions of uniformitarianism (see sidebar) that were erroneously thought to underpin their science (Baker 1998). According to a common, mistaken application of the uniformitarian principle, cataclysmic processes, like those responsible for the origin of the Channeled Scabland, were considered to be unsuitable topics for scientific investigation. To counter this presumption of uniformitarianism, Bretz could only provide meticulously described field evidence for inspection by those willing to seriously consider it. The eventual triumph of his hypothesis, against its initially antagonistic reception, set the stage for the resurgence of a new understanding of geological catastrophism, which is perhaps most prominent today in the acknowledged role of impact cratering in Earth’s history.

Baker has just said that the majority consensus can be wrong – for decades – because of worldview bias, or epistemological presumptions (i.e., presuppositions about what we know and how we know it). These presumptions do not arise from the scientific evidence, but in spite of it: Bretz had the evidence, but his colleagues refused to see it, because in their worldview, such topics were “unsuitable ... for scientific investigation.” This is not a discovery from science. It is a statement of philosophy about science. In the sidebar on uniformitarianism to which Baker referred, he said this:

Uniformitarianism is a regulative principle or doctrine in geology that unfortunately sometimes conflates (a) the pragmatic application of modern process studies to understanding the past (actualism) with (b) substantive presumptions that deny effectiveness to cataclysmic events. As recognized by William Whewell, who invented the term, meaning b is contrary to the logic of science (Baker 1998).²

(For information about Whewell, see the June 2007 Scientist of the Month.) Most of Baker’s paper reviews the evidence in the Channeled Scablands for a megaflood when Lake Missoula breached its ice dam, sending a million cubic feet of water per second towards the Pacific. The evidence includes coulees, cataracts, gravel fans and bars, streamlined residual hills and islands, giant current ripples in the shape of dunes, and large isolated boulders.

He discussed the high-energy processes that left this evidence: vertical vortices (kolks), plucking and cavitation, bedrock erosion and transport. “The scabland megaflooding exhibited phenomenal sediment transport capability, as evidenced by the boulders that were entrained by the flow,” he said. He showed a picture of an 18m boulder that was transported 10 km by the raging waters. The car beside the rock looks small by comparison.
What is the lesson of J Harlen Bretz and the Spokane Flood controversy? Baker discussed this in the ending paragraphs, entitled, “Megafloods as Global Planetary Phenomena”. Have geologists been misapplying uniformitarian presumptions, ignoring evidence for megafloods all around them, on the earth – and even on Mars?

Bretz thought the landforms of the Channeled Scabland to be unique (Bretz 1928a). “Nowhere in the world is there known or suspected,” he wrote (Bretz 1959, p. 56), “a story at all comparable to what we read from the scabland forms.” He reasoned that its uniqueness might make his Spokane Flood hypothesis more acceptable to those who held to the generalization that landscapes are created by the prolonged action of noncataclysmic processes. In recent years, however, cataclysmic flood landscapes with many similarities to the Channeled Scabland have increasingly been documented in many parts of the world (Baker 1997, 2002, 2007). Spectacular examples of GCRs [giant current ripples] are found in central Asia (Baker et al. 1993, Carling 1996, Rudoy 2005), along with immense gravel bars and scour marks (Rudoy & Baker 1993, Carling et al. 2002, Herget 2005). Megaflood streamlined hill morphologies occur in the glacial lake spillway channels of central North America (Kehew & Lord 1986) and on the floor of the English Channel (Gupta et al. 2007). Most surprising to Bretz, however, would be the discovery of scabland-like morphologies on Mars (Baker & Milton 1974; Baker 1982, 2001; Komatsu & Baker 2007).
In addition to stimulating discoveries of cataclysmic flood landscapes, studies of the patterns, forms, and processes evident in the Channeled Scabland have informed understanding of processes that occur at smaller scales in modern bedrock channels that are impacted by extreme, high-energy floods (e.g., Baker 1977, 1984; Baker & Pickup 1987; Baker & Kochel 1988; Baker & Kale 1998). Slackwater deposition by scabland flooding at the mouths of various valleys tributary to the Cheney-Palouse scabland channels (Bretz 1929, Patton et al. 1979) was used to infer flow depths along those channels (Figure 10). This methodology proved to be critical in stimulating the development of that form of paleoflood hydrology that utilizes paleostage indicators for the reconstruction of relatively recent (late Holocene) floods, thereby increasing our understanding the frequencies of rare, modern high-magnitude floods (Baker 1987, 2006, 2008b). Indeed, one can envision a kind of investigation that inverts the usual reasoning process whereby studies of common, small-scale processes are extrapolated to the domain of less common, unobserved large-scale processes.

What should future geologists do? Baker ended by discussing future challenges to understanding the Channeled Scablands. One problem, for instance, is that the volume of water stored in hypothetical Lake Missoula seems “insufficient to account for the indicated levels of maximum inundation throughout the Channeled Scabland and adjacent area.” One possibility is “subglacial outburst flooding from under the Cordilleran Ice Sheet,” he suggested. Details aside, Baker had a concluding remark about bold hypotheses, the nature of scientific inquiry and understanding, and the need to think outside the box:

In retrospect, studies of the Channeled Scabland might be viewed as concerned with the unique origins of a single landscape. However, this remarkable landscape was not studied to test a preexisting hypothesis or theory (e.g., erosion and deposition by high-energy megaflooding). Instead, discoveries about the Channeled Scabland are leading scientific inquiry to the recognition of what can now be seen as related phenomena, such that a completely new theory is required. The resulting rich set of research opportunities traces back to a single imaginative hypothesis proposed in the 1920s by J Harlen Bretz. Though these opportunities may now be pursued with techniques that to Bretz would have seemed almost magical, the most important pathway to advancing understanding remains that which is best exemplified by Bretz’s most lasting contribution: informed and insightful geological fieldwork.

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1. Baker, VR. The Channeled Scabland: A Retrospective. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Vol. 37: 393-411 (Volume publication date May 2009; doi:10.1146/annurev.earth.061008.134726).
2. Baker VR. 1998. Catastrophism and uniformitarianism: Logical roots and current relevance. In Lyell: The Past Is the Key to the Present, ed. DJ Blundell, AC Scott, Spec. Publ. 143, pp. 171–82. London: Geol. Soc.

Hallelujah! A secular geologist finally gets it. Geological science is not always driven by evidence, but by presumptions. This is one of the most remarkable papers from a secular journal in recent memory. It contains lessons for history of science, philosophy of science, rhetoric of science, and the interplay of logic and empiricism.
Before continuing, let the reader understand that Victor Baker is not doubting long ages and evolution. He believes, for instance, that multiple flooding events from Lake Missoula occurred over many thousands of years, the last occurring about 14,500 years ago. It would be unfair to portray Baker as supporting creationist Flood geology. Baker would undoubtedly be angry to be tarred with such associations. Nevertheless, it is certainly fair to take the same principles and methods he advocated and think outside his box, too. Maybe he is on the right track but doesn’t go far enough.
Consider first the empirical evidence. Baker evaluated evidence of high-energy transport processes that are certainly not uniformitarian. Creationist Flood geologists date the Spokane Floods as post-diluvial (i.e., after the global Flood of Noah’s day). The same kind of evidence of high-energy transport, though, is visible throughout the deeper layers of the Grand Canyon. The Great Unconformity, for instance, displays a sudden scouring of the top of basement rock, on which sit most of the sedimentary layers. This Great Unconformity is arguably a worldwide phenomenon. So here is prima facie evidence for a global megaflood in earth history. Right on top of this flat surface (where evolutionists put an imaginary time gap of a billion years) lie the sedimentary layers of the Tapeats Sandstone. In the Tapeats are huge boulders, suggesting the same high-energy transport Baker inferred in the Scablands – not slow deposition over millions of years. The Tapeats, and layers above all the way into the Redwall, show soft sediment deformation in places. Fault lines extend all the way from bottom to top. Most of the contacts between the formations are flat, suggesting there were no time gaps between them. Evolutionists invent time gaps of 10 million years, 60 million years, even 100 million years between some of these formations, just to keep them in sync with their evolutionary assumptions, but you can see with your own eyes that the layers are flat, like a layered cake, with no evidence of the passage of time between them. These are other strong evidences of megaflood far exceeding anything in the Channeled Scablands. To the unbiased mind, the same kind of inferences made at Scablands can be extrapolated at Grand Canyon to infer a megaflood of global proportions. Genesis 6-9 then can be re-examined as a historical record, not myth. It left empirical evidence of its power.
Consider also the philosophical and logical lessons of this paper. For decades, from the 1920s to the 1960s, uniformitarian geologists had blinders on. Their worldview prevented them from seeing evidence that was there for the looking. This should be remembered when creationists are criticized for having “religious motivations” for their scientific models. That criticism cuts both ways. Terry Mortenson, in The Great Turning Point, documented how it was anti-Biblical worldview bias that turned Lyell, Hutton and the other founders of uniformitarianism into apologists for billions of years. Quotes from Lyell show he had a conspiratorial attitude, with a goal of turning the universities against the Scriptural geologists. Like Darwin, these moyboys (pushers of “millions of years, billions of years”) did not “discover” their theories in the data; they instituted a framework for interpreting the data (04/29/2009). This framework served (and continues to serve) to insulate their evolutionary philosophy from falsification. They have put blinders on with their own biased hands.
Baker praised J Harlen Bretz for providing “informed and insightful fieldwork” in support of his bold hypothesis. It took years for that fieldwork to cut through the dogma of the uniformitarians, and now, neo-catastrophism is enjoying a renaissance after 150 years of dogma. Guess what: creationist geologists have been doing “informed and insightful fieldwork” for decades, too. It doesn’t get seen much by the mainstream secular scientific societies, because they have a vested interest in maintaining their evolutionary worldview from serious challenge. But it is good work. You can find it in published journals from the Creation Research Society, Creation Ministries International, Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis and Center for Scientific Creation, among others. You can also see the Flood evidence with your own eyes by taking one of Tom Vail’s rafting trips down the Grand Canyon (see Canyon Ministries; highly recommended for fun as well as education).
Victor Baker did not propose a global Flood like that described in Genesis, but he did bring in some much-needed fresh air into the discussion about how science should be conducted. He pointed out the propensity for worldview bias, even among the leading geologists of the world, that can blind them from evidence for half a century. Nothing in his paper advocates a global megaflood – but nothing rules it out, either. The principles and historical lessons he advocated should liberate those not beholden to blinding uniformitarian presumptions to ask, boldly, “Noah’s Flood – why not?”
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