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Scott offers a new challenge:

I’ll tell you what: you show me evidence that the Soviets enthusiastically incorporated natural selection within their version of Marxism, rather than mere evolution, and then you might have something. Or, alternatively, if you can show me state-approved scientists in 1930-1950 Russia who were lauded for their championing of natural selection, that might be something.

First, from a Marxist point of view, evolution by natural selection is the biological dialectic. Or if you prefer, the dialectic is socio-political evolution by natural selection. Nonsense? I should say so, as is the Labor Theory of Value, macroeconomics and macroevolution, in my opinion. The point is what they believed, not whether we think they were correct to believe it. As for the second part, here’s an initial start, I’m sure Just a Girl could add a few more names as she cited Michurin yesterday.

Theodosius Dobzhansky, University of Leningrad

Architect of the modern Darwin-Mendel synthesis to which Scott himself subscribes. Had the good sense to emigrate to the USA in 1927. Probably wasn’t a Marxist at all, as he was Eastern Orthodox. But since he learned his evolutionary biology in the Soviet Union, it would appear that their Darwinist science couldn’t have been all that different than in the West.

Yuri Filipchenko, University of Leningrad

“Russian entomologist and coiner of the terms microevolution and macroevolution. Mentor of Theodosius Dobzhansky. Though he himself was an orthogenetic he was one of the first scientists to incorporate the laws of Mendel into evolutionary theory and thus had great influence on The Modern Synthesis.”

Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin – Lenin All-Union Academy of Agriculture

Michurin was one of the founding fathers of scientific agricultural selection. He worked on hybridization of plants of similar and different origins, cultivating methods in connection with the natural course of ontogenesis, directing the process of predominance, evaluation and selection of seedlings, acceleration of process of selection with the help of physical and chemical factors. Michurin’s method of crossing of geographically distant plants would be widely used by other selectionists…. Throughout all his life Michurin worked to create new sorts of fruit plants. He introduced over 300 new species. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and Order of the Red Banner of Labor for his achievements.”

Sergei Sergeevich Chetverikov – Department of Genetics at Gorky University

“One of the founders of population genetics and synthetic theory of evolution.”

As for a famous Marxist Darwinist outside the Soviet Union, there is of course Richard Dawkins’s hero, J.B.S. Haldane.

“Haldane was very idealistic, and in his youth was a devoted Communist and author of many articles in The Daily Worker and was the chairman of the editorial board of the London edition for several years. In 1937, Haldane had become a Marxist, and an open supporter of the Communist Party, but not yet a member of the Party. He would join the Party in 1942…. He left the Communist party in 1950, shortly after having toyed with standing for Parliament as a Communist Party candidate.”

Nikolai Vavilov
“Member of the USSR Central Executive Committee, President of All-Union Geographical Society and a recipient of the Lenin Prize. In 1940 he was jailed as a defender of the “bourgeois pseudoscience” (genetics) in a struggle with Lysenkoism, and died of malnutrition in a prison in 1943. The majority of his genetic samples were seized by a German collecting command set up in 1943, and the samples were transferred to the SS Institute for Plant Genetics, which had been established at the Lannach Castle near Graz, Austria…. The leader of the German command was Heinz Brücher, an SS officer who was also a plant genetics expert.”

Now the Pharyngulans are just clutching at straws. After I pointed out that Nazis weren’t even permitted to serve in the Wehrmacht at the time when the previously mentioned belt buckle was issued, in 1937, Windy came up with this rationale:

The requirement of not being affiliated with a political party did not stop the Wehrmacht members from swearing allegiance to Hitler. It’s not a belt buckle of the Nazi party, but it’s a belt buckle of the army of Nazi Germany.

I find it strange that I should have to point this out, but swearing obedience to Hitler – and even unconditional obedience is not allegiance – did not make one a member of the German National Socialist Workers Party. If promising to obey your commander-in-chief is indicative of one’s political party, then we must conclude that all Marines, Army Rangers and Navy SEALs are Republicans. That is ridiculous.

The millions of members of the Wehrmacht did not swear allegiance to Hitler personally, again, that was the Waffen SS, who swore him both loyalty and obedience. The Wehrmacht oath only swore obedience to Hitler in his persona as supreme commander of the armed forces, little different than hundreds of similar oaths sworn by soldiers to their warleaders since pre-Roman times. The Wehrmacht oath was as follows:

I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be prepared, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.

The SS oath, on the other hand, was a personal one. Remember that any member of any branch of the SS was also a member of the Nazi party.

“I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer and Chancellor of the German Nation, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you and to my superiors designated by you obedience to the death. So help me God.”

All of this is a salient lesson in reminding Christians of Jesus Christ’s admonishment to refrain from taking oaths. Matthew 5:33-37

“Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

I think we’re starting to wear down here. Needless to say, I remain utterly unconvinced of the long-term viability of TENS; while I’ve learned a lot about it, I’m more underwhelmed with it than I was when we started. Still, I’m not disappointed, as Scott and I seem to have reached somewhat of an accord regarding the distinct division between the reasonable scientific application of TENS and its unreasonable non-scientific implications. Regarding the science component, however, Scott still does not appear to grasp the basic concept that post-facto “predictions” cannot reasonably be described as genuine testable predictions. His most recent post underlines this.

To the best of my knowledge, the first suggestion that human chromosome #2 might’ve been produced by the fusion of two chromosomes which exist separately in chimps was made in a paper “Comparaison de la structure fine des chromatides d’Homo sapiens et de Pan troglodytes” by LeJeune, Dutrrilaux, Rethore and Prieur which appeared in 1973. I don’t have the original, but the abstract for that paper can be seen here.*

Now, look at this wording: “the first SUGGESTION that… MIGHT’VE BEEN PRODUCED” is not at all equivalent to the “testable prediction” he cites as proof, which was that “the common ancestor had 48 chromosomes (24 pairs) and humans carry a fused chromosome; or ancestor had 23 pairs and apes carry a split chromosome.”

Later, when he talks about the “original speculative hypothesis” he explains that it “predicted that telomeric signatures would be identified.” However, this is still not the “testable prediction” that was claimed after the fact. It’s entirely possible that the “testable prediction” was made prior to the tests, but we still haven’t seen proof of it.

Until evolutionists stop collecting data and then making post-facto “predictions” that magically happen to fit the data they just collected, I see no reason to take them seriously or pay their models any attention at all, let alone “believe” in their conclusions. It’s intellectually shady, in my opinion, and reminds me of financial touts who claim correctly calling 10 past winners while conveniently neglecting to mention the 30 losers they advocated with equal enthusiasm.

What’s especially amusing is how often their post-facto predictions turn out to be wrong despite having been made after collecting the data. I mean, even the hopelessly inaccurate Keynesians usually don’t have to correct themselves more than once after the fact. (If you don’t grasp my margin of error argument, which applies equally to macroeconomics and macroevolution, compare the Federal Reserve’s initial estimate of GDP growth for a quarter, the updated estimate, the reported number, and the subsequent revision sometime. It’s not unheard of for the margin of error to be more than 100 percent.)

Ten million-year-old fossils discovered in Ethiopia show that humans and apes probably split six or seven million years earlier than widely thought, according to landmark study released Wednesday…. But the new fossils, dubbed “Chororapithecus abyssinicus” by the team of Japanese and Ethiopian paleoanthropologists who found them, place the early ancestors of the modern day gorilla 10 to 10.5 million years in the past, suggesting that the human-ape split occurred before that…. Conventional scientific wisdom, based on genetic “distances” measured by molecular geneticists, had placed the divergence between chimps and humans some five to six million years ago.

Even with a massive time scale and allowing for a variance of 500 to 1,000 millenia, that’s a huge error of around 87.5 percent. Aside from demonstrating the very crude nature of the “science”, it leads to the obvious question: If we assume that TENS is a reasonable model for historical detection, and scientists don’t seem to have anything better at this point, which is incorrect, archeological TENS or genetic TENS? And what accounts for the discrepancies?

Once scientists have got the historical record straight, perhaps they can begin attempting to actually test genuine predictions instead of attempting to substitute “it doesn’t rule it out” for “predicts.” In the meantime, it is as absurd for them to waste their time bashing evolutionary skeptics as it is for economists to get their panties in a bunch about Keynesian skeptics. The frantic hand-waving only creates more doubts than it resolves. Occam’s Razor strongly suggests that if a conceptual model is unconvincing, it’s simply because the model is insufficiently reliable to generate confidence in it.

I don’t dislike Michigan, but how can you not be psyched for Appalachian State. I guess this means that the big schools will start scheduling high school teams for their cupcake quotient:

What was supposed to be a tuneup turned into a stunner: Appalachian State 34, No. 5 Michigan 32. Julian Rauch’s 24-yard field goal with 26 seconds left Saturday put the Mountaineers ahead of the Wolverines and Corey Lynch blocked a field goal in the final seconds to seal one of college football’s biggest upsets.

Fresh from citing Dr. Wilkin’s incomplete “evisceration” of Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, Dr. PZ Myers actually thinks this rambling, ignorant post by Ed Darrell has “completely eviscerated” my explication of the historical link between Darwinism and Marxism. It’s pretty clear that everyone’s favorite assistant community college professor has no idea what the word “eviscerate” means. Damn those public schools!

I’ve already explained that Ed has no clue about what the facts of the matter are, but there’s no point in attempting to explain dialectical materialism, much less its overt links with Darwinism, to someone too stupid to understand the difference between the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS. You’ll understand why I don’t waste any more time on this buffoon when you see that he has linked a photograph of a German pre-WWII belt buckle saying “Gott mit uns” followed by this most amusing statement:

So according to Vox, this photograph is impossible

Now, do please look at the words right under the photo.

“Enlisted Man’s German Army belt buckle”.

The German Army is the Wehrmacht, it was not the 930,000-strong Nazi army known as the Waffen SS. The Wehrmacht slogan, “Gott mit uns”, dates back to 1870. For the benefit of these two historical ignoramuses, I note that 1870 is prior to the foundation of the German National Socialist Workers Party. The Nazis refused to use the “Gott mit uns” slogan and chose “Mein Ehre Heisst Treu” instead. I even pointed out these facts to both Ed and PZ previously. Ach du lieber, what a pair of idiots. How much confidence would you place in the historical knowledge of an individual who argued that the U.S. Army’s motto was Semper Fi, and on this basis, concluded that the 101st Airborne were a Catholic institution?

As for the rest, once more it is demonstrated how atheists will stubbornly rely on their piss-poor logic instead of copious amounts of undeniable evidence. The following statement was posted in the comments here by a reader who grew up in the Soviet Union and was educated there. Ed posted repeated comments after this and yet continues to pretend that this evidence doesn’t exist while erroneously proclaiming that I am lying and other evidence I possess doesn’t exist because I won’t do his research for him.

Above is the link to the text of the book in Russian, called “The Teaching of Michurin and Religion.” (published 1955) In a nutshell it says, that the theory of Darwin is very progressive,and materialistic, but has some drawbacks, which were corrected by a Soviet Darwinist Michurin, who was the only true Darwinist becase he used the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin as the basis for his scientific research. Stalin was not against the theory of Darwin, he was against genetics, and the book which was published only 2 years after his death, says that those scienists who belived in genetics, were not really Darwinists, and only Michurin, Lisenko and some others were true “creative Darwinists”. Vox is absolutely correct, Stalin wasn’t against Darwin, the theory of Darwin was very important for the development of historic materialism, which was the basis for marxism-leninism. After Stalin’s death, they just proclaimed that he was wrong about genetics, that it was perfectly compatible with theory of Darwin, and went on teaching it at schools.

This chapter of the book is called The role of Darwin’s theory in the struggle of science against religion.

The link above is to a part of the document from 1948, when Stalin was yet alive, I think it’s a transcript of the session of the Russian Scientific Academy, which calls Lisenko the scientist who is developing the theory of Darwin and Michurin. Once again, Vox is absolutely right. Stalin was against Mendel and Morgan, but NOT against Darwin. And he considered Lisenko and Michurin the true Darwinists.

It’s really stupid of PZ and Ed to attempt to maintain their hopeless position. There are no shortage of Russian and East German textbooks explicitly maintaining the precise link between Darwinism and Marxism that I have explained. Ed confesses that he doesn’t have much about socialism or the Soviet Union in his library and he’s just frantically scouring the Internet; too bad for him that I read German and TPAM reads Russian. But I should thank them, really, as it has given me a solid idea for my next book now that The Irrational Atheist is complete.

UPDATE – Tim Day comments at Pharyngula: Even if it were demonstrably true that all of Stalin’s excesses were directly inspired by Darwin I don’t see that it makes any difference at all to the truth of evolution. To claim it does is such an egregious category error that it seems to me to outrank any of Vox’s historical idiocy.

First, my “historical idiocy” is much more precisely described as “historical accuracy”. Second, I have never claimed that the way in which Darwin’s theories undeniably inspired and justified Marxism has any significance regarding the truth or falsehood of evolution, for the obvious reason that it doesn’t.

UPDATE II – Scott Hatfield exhibits some uncharacteristically poor reasoning here: You can’t trust either PZ or Ed Darrell (an unlikely tag team, that) because (Vox implies) they can’t get their facts about who wore what belt buckle when. Obviously, I think that’s an unworthy argument.

No, Scott, you can’t trust them because they repeat the factual error even after the error has been expressly pointed out to them, so they know that what they are saying is not true. Nor is this the first time that either of them has done this.

In which I concur with Amynda:

The TV is tuned to ESPN, and of course, they’re doing a sob piece grasping for some way to draw a connection between Virginia Tech’s football team playing football and the tragic shooting last spring. God, lit candles, school spirit, it’s all very grotesque. I wish that just once during one of these sob pieces trying to create a relationship between a sporting event and some senseless tragedy, someone would say, “Well Tragedy X taught me that there is no god, the universe is indifferent to human suffering, and life has no outside meaning, so it’s up to us to make our own meaning. Which is why I like sports.”

I find that sort of thing entirely grotesque as well. It’s emotional pornography for psychic succubi. But the reason no one ever says that sort of thing on TV, isn’t only due to its divergence from the script for live TV coverage of tragedy – how does that make you you feel? – but because even the most socially autistic atheist knows better than to share his “rational” materialism when people are in pain.

Which I think is a pity. Unlike the universe, I wouldn’t be indifferent to his subsequent suffering after getting deservedly punched in the face by the grieving. I’d just be amused.

First, here’s the draft order, which was randomly determined. The order reverses each round:

1. W.C. Silver Spooners
2. Burns Hausfraurers
3. Mounds View Meerkats
4. Village Valkyries
5. Masonville Marauders
6. Black Mouth Curs
7. Greenfield Grizzlies
8. East Mesa White Trash
9. Winston Reverends
10. Cranberry Bogs

What you must do in preparation for the draft today is to first select your keepers and place them in the My Players group (on the RIGHT) in the your Edit Draft rankings screen. Then exclude the following list of players, except for your four keepers. (Exclusion is to the LEFT). Reverends, since you’re only keeping two, just place Henry and Wayne in My Players.

Carson Palmer
Peyton Manning
Tom Brady
Vince Young
Donovan McNabb
Eli Manning
Frank Gore
Ronnie Brown
Larry Johnson
Brian Westbrook
Shaun Alexander
Laurence Maroney
Willie Parker
Reggie Bush
Maurice Jones-Drew
Rudi Johnson
Thomas Jones
Willis McGahee
Travis Henry
LaDainian Tomlinson
Joseph Addai
LaMont Jordan
Marvin Harrison
Torry Holt
Javon Walker
Chad Johnson
Terrell Owens
Reggie Wayne
Larry Fitzgerald
Roy Williams
Steve Smith
Antonio Gates
Steven Jackson
Anquan Boldin
Donald Driver
Jacksonville DEF
Baltimore DEF
San Diego DEF

If you have problems let me know. If for some reason you can’t, email me your login information and I’ll take care of it. It’s very easy, though. This way, even if everyone autodrafts, we will all end up with the correct keepers. Comment here once you’ve edited your rankings; Greenfield and Mounds View already have.

One aspect of my debate with Scott Hatfield that seems to have escaped the attention of every single TENS enthusiast or Darwin defender is that my use of concepts from economics to criticize evolution is neither strange nor inappropriate. I submit that it is entirely natural given the way in which evolutionists have attempted to coopt certain economic concepts in much the same way past economists – the Marxists in particular – coopted Darwinism on behalf of their “scientific” discipline.

In this light, it is amusing to compare the following three statements:

“I have a hunch that we may come back to look back on the invention of the ESS [Evolutionary Stable Strategy] as one of the most important advances in evolutionary theory since Darwin.”
– Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“But if, as is generally the case, there are more than two players or the players have both conflicting and joint interests, there may be no solutions or there may be many. We often settle for outcomes that are more stable, enforceable, or equitable than the others. Although these solutions may be plausible, they are generally not compelling.”
– Morton Davis, Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction

“It is probably clear, then, that games do contain some of the basic elements that are present in almost any interesting conflict situation. Does it follow that we can learn useful things by beginning a study with them? Not necessarily. It may be that military, economic and social situations are just basically too complicated to be approached through game concepts. This possibility gains credence from the fact that the body of Game doctrine now in existence is not even able to cope with full-blown real games; rather, we are restricted to watered-down versions of complicated ones, such as Poker.”
– J.D. Williams, The Compleat Strategyst

Now, if Darwinists can argue that the socialist expropriation and misapplication of evolution is bad science, and I think they can, then economists can just as reasonably argue that the evolutionist expropriation and misapplication of game theory is equally bad science. Nor is it unreasonable to conclude that if a poorly understood and incorrectly applied economic concept is one of the most important advances in evolutionary theory since Darwin, the theory is likely to have some significant weaknesses.

After reading The Selfish Gene and concocting a parody of ESS “science”, I was inspired to pick up a copy of John Maynard Smith’s Evolution and the Theory of Games. I hope to write a critical review of it in the next month or two.

I expect to find that the primary flaw will turn out to be that evolutionists are making the same mistake as the macroeconomists and game theoreticians in assuming perfectly rational decision makers. (The game theoreticians openly recognize this flaw, the Keynesians and Darwinists blithely ignore it.) The fact that Darwinists are making this assumption of rational action in the case of plants and animals instead of humans only makes their theories look even more absurd than the dysfunctional Keynesian models; the good news is that their use of game theory allows for substantive empirical criticism of their research.

It’s hard to take the con out of the con man:

Disgraced pastor Ted Haggard won’t be fundraising for a Monument nonprofit run by a sex offender, won’t be ministering to anyone and needs to get a job, his overseers said in a statement released this afternoon.

“Mr. Haggard’s solicitation for personal support was inappropriate,” his church supervisors said in the statement.

One of my primary criticisms of organized Christianity is that there are unquestionably a number of con men and drama queens in the pulpit. Some of them are drawn to the idea of making money by doing little more than talking, others simply like being on stage with all eyes upon them every week. I don’t view this as a problem with Christianity itself – Jesus Christ and Paul both warn the believer about it – but it is a genuine problem that churches really aren’t doing a very good job of policing.

My position is that no fallen pastor should ever be allowed to return to the ministry. Forgiveness and restoration to the community upon repentance should of course be granted, but a return to a position of authority or spiritual oversight should never be permitted.

I don’t trust anyone who makes a better-than-average living by fund-raising, be it religious, political or charity.