Evolutionary evasionists

John Derbyshire performs the customary evolutionist quote-a-dope:

Several readers have sent me Fred Reed’s rumination on evolution (go look for the March 7 column), which I had anyway read — I am a great Fred fan. Fred & I have been exchanging occasional emails for a few years, and are basically simpatico — he knows a surprising amount of math. What did I think of the March 7 column? Well, I think the answers to some of Fred’s questions are rather obvious. E.g.: Why are so many biologists reluctant to say “I don’t know” when they don’t know the answer to a question? Because they are members of the human race, that’s why. Who among us is *not* so reluctant? (Not anti-evolutionists, for sure!)

Where Fred raises actual technical questions about the processes of evolution, they are ones that have been dealt with many, many times over, in books and on websites that are easy to find. This website is particularly good & well organized. I have started just sending the link for it in response to people who harass me with 2,000-word screeds about abiogenesis, frog proteins, or color vision. It’s all there, with plentiful references for further reading.

Sure, Derb, and that’s how one answer questions about math, right? After all, the vast majority of questions about math have been answered many, many times over, in books and on websites that are easy to find, and yet he never has a problem answering them in those cases. If anyone bothers to go check this one out and determine if it answers the specific questions Fred raised, do let me know. I expect it’s the usual weasel-wordeded, multi-citationed fury signifying nothing. Also, given that scientists and the sciencismic faithful claim that scientists are above the aforementioned human frailty by virtue of their training, Derb’s defense is embarrassingly weak. It reminds me of the way journalists are supposedly trained not to be biased….

I’m an anti-evolutionist and I have no problem whatsoever saying “I don’t know”. Beacuse I don’t know, neither does Derb and neither do the PhD-credentialed biologists. I’m starting to think that the last people to seriously believe in evolution were the eugenicists; the fact that most people who claim to believe in evolution find eugenicism completely repulsive demonstrates what little faith they have in natural selection.

Still, there’s no shame in that. After all, Jesus repeatedly pointed out the same thing about his followers.