A formidable defender of Darwin

Since Paul Zachary is so fearful, perhaps I should debate this kid. He can’t be any less capable of presenting a logical argument, and clearly he can parrot the current Cult of Darwin consensus with the best of them:

Amid the hoots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry for saying there were “gaps” in the theory of evolution, the strongest evidence for Darwinism presented by these soi-disant rationalists was a 9-year-old boy quoted in the New York Times.

After his mother had pushed him in front of Perry on the campaign trail and made him ask if Perry believed in evolution, the trained seal beamed at his Wicked Witch of the West mother, saying, “Evolution, I think, is correct!”

That’s the most extended discussion of Darwin’s theory to appear in the mainstream media in a quarter-century. More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

Well, if a nine year-old kid thinks it’s correct, it must be correct! QED. Miss Coulter’s last claim is certainly interesting, given the massive emphasis that the Cult of Darwin places upon exposing schoolchildren to its relentless propaganda at an early age. But who would have thought that children who can barely learn to read in 12 years of public school might have a tough time retaining anything they’ve been taught about a dynamic quasi-scientific theory?

Personally, I tend to find it extremely amusing when accused of being ignorant about TENSTE(p)NSBMGDaGF. Never mind that I was taught about it in public school by credentialed members of the Cult of Darwin in precisely the manner the cultists advocate. The fact is that unlike most Darwinians, I have read seven of Richard Dawkins’s ten books, two of Stephen Gould’s, a random assortment of books by other authors including Charles Darwin, Marc Hauser and Daniel Dennett, around 50 published papers which relate to natural selection in some way and more than 20 years worth of magazines such as Natural History and New Scientist.

This doesn’t make me any sort of expert on the subject. But I should think it tends to indicate that I am not completely uninformed about it. And it’s certainly ironic to be repeatedly accused of ignorance when not having read any economists from Turgot to Tobin or theologians from Tertullian to Craig ever seems to prevent credentialed Cult of Darwin members from opining authoritatively on economics or theology.


Seculars are seriously insane

Datechguy simultaneously sums up the inherent lunacy of the “evolution in the schools” debate and illustrates the insanity of the secular science fetishists:

My friend is an educated man in his 40′s. Both he and his father owned small business and are longtime republicans. We were going through the potential GOP nominees when he declared he was afraid of Rick Perry because of his fundamentalist belief in the Bible (specifically on evolution). He argued that if he doesn’t believe in Evolution what OTHER science does he not believe in?

I’ve already said something in my gut doesn’t care for Rick Perry but this caused me to do a double take; I answered:

“Unemployment is 9.1%, the economy is in the tank and you’re worried about a candidate’s position on how old the planet is?”

It is instructional to see how secularist Americans are attempting to construct the very walls they once condemned. Whereas they still complain that there was a time when belief in God was an essential societal requirement, now they are simply substituting a different religious dogma to serve as a litmus test. Their concerns can’t possibly be about science, as there probably aren’t more than one or two Senators who could pass a college level physics test or more than ten who could pass an economics one. I’d be surprised if any of the candidates other than Ron Paul or Mitt Romney could even tell you what something as simple as marginal utility or a reserve requirement is.

I don’t like Rick Perry either, nor would I vote for him, but his opinion on the age of the planet and the origin of the species is probably somewhere around number 345,732 on my list of concerns about the man.

The irony is that the same people who believe that fiscal stimulus ends economic contractions and FDR’s New Deal ended the Great Depression will tell you, with a straight face, that you are ignorant and should not be permitted to hold office if you don’t believe that all cats and dogs are the descendants of a single catdog 42 million years ago. Because, you know, that’s so much more relevant to the main political issues of the day than economic and geopolitical rationality.

The truth is that all cats and dogs are descended from a male calico catdog named Fluffy Leghumper who was born on May 17th, 41,997,010 BC. His two kitten-pups, fathered on different female catdogs, were Patches and Happy Sniffbottom. And thus cats and dogs evolved. True science fact. And if you don’t believe in Fluffy Leghumper, you’re just ignorant and you know nothing about science.


Mailvox: concerning the questions

MD has a few follow-up questions:

Enjoyed reading your answers to NYT ‘questioning’ If nothing else, I think you exhibit the (admirable) virtue of honesty. As you can probably imagine, a couple of points I need to raise:

1a) firstly, and most importantly, there is absolutely no way that evolution is ‘a minor aspect of biological science’! I wonder which professor of biological sciences you are quoting? Evolution is the central and unifying concept of modern biology & medicine. When you say you are skeptical of evolution, I’m not sure you are clear about on what level you disagree. I too (as a holder of 2 1st class BSc. s. & an MSc. in the biological sciences, you could say I am skeptical about some aspects of some hypotheses of evolutionary theory. However, Do you :

1b) believe that the Judeo-Christian literal creationist hypotheses are equally likely to be objectively true as the theories of modern evolutionary science?

1c) On what level do you NOT believe in evolution? I’ve never met anyone that says that the gene pool of one generation is IDENTICAL to the next. The basic premiss of evolutionary theory is that there is a difference (ie a CHANGE in the gene pool).

1d) From what basis do you say that mainstream scientific theory shouldn’t be taught in public schools?!

2) I agree that America could be described as a ‘Christian Nation’ as the majority of it’s citizen’s consistently describe themselves as such in all respectable polls that I have seen. [of course we shouldn’t forget that the reason that America is a Christian nation is because the Christians got rid of all the pagans! ]

However, I feel it is a bit disingenuous of an educated American to say that it was founded by Christians; the founding fathers were clearly a mixture of Christians and deists and agnostics. In the official words of John Adams : ‘As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion . . . ‘

3) on the issue of teachers leading students in prayers, I myself have no problem with this. I did have an issue with my daughter being forced to pray at school – which has now been resolved. She has decided not to, but sits amongst her peers as a time of reflection during prayer. (actually, she switches between praying and not praying – which is, from my perspective, is how it should be.) For me, the most important thing is for my children to be free to form their own beliefs.

Lastly, I think it’s important for Christians to realise that the reason that I don’t describe myself as a Christian is because the overwhelming majority of THEM have excluded ME (not the other way around), because I happen to believe that Jesus didn’t have magical powers like Harry potter, despite thinking that he was highly likely to have been an admirable and remarkable man in his times.

1a. Evolution is not the central and unifying concept of modern biology and medicine. It is almost completely irrelevant to both. No doctor, and few biologists, need know anything about evolution at all in order to perform their various medical and scientific duties. Even if you subscribe fully to whatever the Cult of Darwin’s latest dogma happens to be, this is akin to saying that the Greek Classics are the central and unifying concept of economics and plumbing. The fact that there may be some intellectual relationship, even a direct causal one, doesn’t necessarily make it the least bit relevant today. Men – religious men, ironically enough – managed to figure out both artificial selection and genetics without any help from evolutionary theory; even if true, it’s almost completely useless. True or not, evolution’s only significance is philosophical, which is why its advocates invariably sound more like cultists than scientists.

1b. There are too many hypotheses on both sides for me to possibly say. I can only say that I believe some form of Creator is far more likely to be objectively true than either abiogenesis or any form of Darwinian evolution. It may be my technological bias, but I see genes as being more akin to the primitives of a programming language than to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle gradually assembled over time by the processes of natural selection, biased mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, or any other epicyclical mechanism the Darwinian cultists can conceive. This implies both the creator of the language as well as a programmer or two.

1c. The level on which I am skeptical of evolution – I do not entirely rule out the possibility – is that any of the various evolutionary mechanisms proposed are sufficient to modify the gene pool to such an extent as to create new and entirely different species regardless of the amount of time involved.

1d. There is zero utility in attempting to teach science to schoolchildren who can’t read, can’t do math, and will never be scientists. They can’t understand it, aren’t interested in it, and have no use for it. It makes no difference if you’re trying to teach them mainstream scientific theory, iambic tetrameter, or running the 100m dash in five seconds. It isn’t ever going to happen. My return question: how can you justify teaching public schoolchildren mainstream scientific theory and not teaching them basic personal economics like how to balance a checkbook or calculate compound interest or basic physical fitness?

2. The “mixture of Christians and deists and agnostics” among the Founding Fathers was on the order of 99% to 1%. It would not merely be disingenuous, it is flat out wrong to state that America was NOT founded by Christians. There were more Founding Fathers with theological degrees than deists and atheists combined; there were more Founding Fathers who personally translated the Bible than there were deists and atheists combined. This is why even intelligent, educated atheists often find themselves inadvertently looking very historically illiterate, as they tend to be maleducated in certain areas. Unfortunately, the reason many are maleducated on this particular issue is due to an all too typical atheist dishonesty with regards to standard word definitions; in this case, whoever constructed the atheist talking point attempted to revise the term “Founding Fathers” to mean a very small number of men, as few as seven “key” Founding Fathers. This is blatantly incorrect, as there have always been two groups of Founding Fathers, the Signers and the Framers. In both cases, nearly all of the men involved were Christians.

In fact, the maleducated atheist opinion doesn’t even rise to the level of Wikipedia: “Of the 55 delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, 49 were Protestants, and three were Roman Catholics.” And more detailed information is readily available.

3. Admiration, even belief, is not worship. Even belief in Jesus Christ’s “magical powers” would not be sufficient to make a Christian. Even the demons believe, but they do not worship. No man can exclude a man from the body of Christ except that man himself.


Correcting the butterfly collector

As various studies have reported, biologists are the least intelligent of the science majors. And as a perusal of any biology major’s curriculum will show, most of them are completely uneducated in history, in logic, and in philosophy. There isn’t even much use of the actual scientific method in their “science”; there is a reason that hard scientists have long denigrated them as “butterfly collectors. While Richard Dawkins is the most notorious example of a biologist who foolishly attempts to opine outside his area of expertise, at least he usually appears to have some idea of what he is talking about when biological evolution is the subject. PZ Myers, on the other hand, is so intellectually undisciplined that he cannot keep even simple things straight when the subject he teaches at his community college is the topic at hand:

1. Of course biologists have considered alternate mechanisms! Coyne argues for selection as a mechanism of speciation (by pleiotropic side effects of genes that are selected for other functions), and Futuyma argues for speciation by drift.

2. Similarly, mechanisms of abiogenesis have been proposed that suggest selection, but also chance or as a necessary outcome of the physico-chemical properties.

3. The structure of DNA was analyzed by its chemistry, not it’s evolutionary history, obviously, but as this paragraph even concedes, the consequences of DNA biochemistry were profoundly important in their effects on evolution.

4. Nope. Structure of DNA was determined in 1953; the neo-Darwinian synthesis occurred in the 1930s-1940s with the integration of genetics into evolutionary biology. It was genetics (especially population genetics) that established evolution as the only reasonable explanation for the history of life on earth.

5. The precise taxonomic status of Archaeopteryx was not a specific prediction of evolutionary theory. Finding more data in the form of more fossils of feathered dinosaurs strengthens the idea of avian descent from dinosaurs.

6. If you examine the family tree of Archaeopteryx and Xiaotingia, what you should see is that the taxonomic re-evaluation of Archeopteryx merely moves it from the Paraves branch to the nearby Deinonychosaurian branch…hardly a “wildly wrong” model.

7. Vox Day has not described anything yet which shows evolution being wrong. Adjusting the precise timing of evolutionary events by millions of years is a reasonable response to new data which does not falsify the underlying hypotheses of relatedness.

8. Again, this discovery does not demonstrate the opposite of what evolutionary biologists have been claiming, and actually makes for a better fit with other data about ancient bird ancestors; moving Archaeopteryx from a first cousin to a second cousin of the ancestor of modern birds isn’t a radical idea that invalidates evolutionary biology.

The big picture is even more damning for Vox Day. Of course we have huge volumes of information supporting the theory of evolution, that suite of mechanisms and principles that describe the broad course of evolutionary history, including common descent and descent with modification. And also there are a multitude of details that aren’t completely known — we have millions of species on this planet, and only a fraction have been studied in depth. The theory of evolution does not hang on the exact lineage of any two species out of those millions…it hangs on the fact that there is a lineage.

Vox Day is quite the poseur — he pretends to know better than real scientists, when he can’t even tell the difference between hypothesis and data.

First, let me begin by addressing PZ’s remarkably foolish comment at the end. He knows perfectly well that I know the difference between hypothesis and data, this is just his characteristic posturing in a groundless attempt to argue from the lectern. His pretense that anyone, let alone a superintelligence of my confirmed cognitive capacity, might have any difficulty distinguishing the two concepts accomplishes little more than to imply he teaches a remarkably low caliber of student. Second, I will note that I don’t pretend to know better than real scientists, I often prove that I know better than they do.

Consider, for example, the public statements of the illustrious Paul Krugman, professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and 2008 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics versus Vox Day, level 72 Dwarf Hunter and one-time Pooyan world champion, concerning the price of gold in 2002, the housing market in 2005, the success of the Obama stimulus plan in 2009, the economic theory of the Austrian School, or even the historical expenditures of the Hoover administration in 1929-1933. Back when gold cost $325 per ounce, Krugman was declaring gold to be “just a metal” and pushing the Fed to create a housing bubble while I was writing columns urging readers to stay out of real estate and invest in “the barbarous relic” instead. Gold is now at $1,750. Case-Shiller is now at 125.41 and falling; it’s already below the 126.13 of Q3-2002. So you see, Dawkins and Myers are neither the first nor the last scientists to have been my bitches.

I have no need to rely upon any pretense of superior knowledge when I can cite numerous empirically confirmed demonstrations of it. PZ would have done much better to question if my proven ability “to know better than real scientists” translates from economics, economic history, and finance to evolutionary biology, global warming, and other quasi-scientific subjects. No doubt PZ considers himself a real scientist, so let’s see how he did with his seven specific points.

1. PZ failed to comprehend the point of what I wrote when I asked when any evolutionist has reconsidered the basic hypothesis that species evolve into different species through natural selection as a result of the falsity of one, ten, or even a hundred predictions based upon it. Obviously, I am well aware of the existence of proposed “alternate mechanisms”, otherwise I would not openly mock the “Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow” aka TE(p)NSBMGDaGF in the Voxicon.

The point was not that no one has ever proposed an alternative method, but rather, that alternative methods, (or as I prefer to call them, evolutionary epicycles), are invariably proposed in lieu of contemplating the possibility that the basic hypothesis is simply wrong. When an astrophysicist or an economist gets a prediction based on a hypothesis wrong, his consequent assumption is usually that the hypothesis is incorrect. When an evolutionary biologist gets a prediction based on a hypothesis wrong, his consequent assumption is always that the hypothesis cannot possibly be to blame, there must be some missing factor that has not been properly taken into account. If evolution by natural selection has not taken place, then evolution by some other mechanism must have taken place; the logical conclusion that the core hypothesis is simply incorrect and evolution did not take place is seldom, if ever, considered an option.

2. PZ’s answer is completely irrelevant. There is zero evidence that abiogenesis ever took place, robustly imagined mechanisms for it notwithstanding. To claim that because there was no life before, but there is now, ergo abiogenesis occurred, is the very sort of philosophy that science has largely come to supplant. Evolutionists tend to wisely punt on the logically-dictated abiogenetic foundation upon which their materialist assumptions rest, but there is no reason anyone should permit them to do so. It’s rather like economists who attempt to leave debt out of their equations. The numbers may all add up nicely without it, but leaving out the most important element tends to call the entire model into question.

3. PZ could actually have claimed some very limited credit for evolutionary theory on the basis of Linus Pauling’s contribution to the discovery of DNA, but instead he demonstrates that he completely failed to comprehend the point. It is irrelevant that he believes “the consequences of DNA biochemistry were profoundly important in their effects on evolution”. That is surely true, but it doesn’t change the truth of my statement that evolutionary theory was not required for the development of DNA. In fact, it’s rather like saying the consequences of the beheading were profoundly important in their effects on the criminal’s future activities.

4. The timeline of Mendelian genetics, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, and the discovery of DNA are not relevant here. The salient point is that DNA, which required no assistance from evolutionary theory to develop although it did receive some as per Pauling’s aforementioned contribution, has exploded numerous decades-old assumptions by the evolutionists, including the Tree of Life and the very concept of speciation itself. As DNA is better understood, (which understanding requires absolutely nothing from evolutionary theory), there is a reasonable probability that it will eventually undermine the entire idea of evolution and not merely the natural selection mechanism. Still, the only reason evolution is still considered even remotely relevant to actual science that does not revolve around the increasingly futile efforts to provide a solid scientific foundation for a proof of evolution is due to the perceived connection between DNA and TE(p)NSBMGDaGF. No scientist attempting to improve DNA identification or unravel the mysteries of junk DNA finds it terribly useful to incorporate natural selection into their research. Indeed, to the extent that researchers concern themselves with the evolutionary utility of “junk DNA”, they are arguably hindering their research by chasing a rotting red herring. It’s rather like the way Keynesians avidly investigate global savings rates while paying no attention to the various debt/GDP ratios.

5. What a load of historically revisionist nonsense. Anyone who grew up in the 1970s can remember the pride of place that Archaeopteryx held in evolutionary theory. It was a “missing link”, it was cited as proof of evolution in our elementary school textbooks. It still has its own Wikipedia entry: “The first remains of Archaeopteryx were discovered just two years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Archaeopteryx seemed to confirm Darwin’s theories and has since become a key piece of evidence for the origin of birds, the transitional fossils debate, and confirmation of evolution.” Finding more data in the form of more fossils of feathered dinosaurs suggests that more dinosaurs had feathers, it doesn’t strengthen “the idea of avian descent from dinosaurs”, primarily for what should be the obvious reason that the significant avian is no longer avian.

6. PZ skates over the fact that the erstwhile bird is no longer a bird, but merely a another type of dinosaur, means that it is not the transitional species it was once believed to be. This not only serves to demolish the scientific importance of Archaeopteryx, but also undermines the confirmation of Darwin’s theories that its “first bird” claim once supported.

7. This is an absurd statement. PZ here illustrates why real scientists, whose predictive models are actually expected to perform to high degrees of accuracy, hold the butterfly collectors in scientific contempt. The reason Daniel Dennett was forced to appeal to astrophysics rather than evolutionary biology when he praises science is because the latter lacks the “amazingly accurate results” that has generated so much respect for the former. Evolutionary biology has simply never delivered any reasonable predictive results in over 150 years and has been responsible for an incredible number of frauds as well as false predictions. When Samuelsonian economists attempt to get away with margins of error measured in the billions of dollars – the most recent Q1-2011 revision of GDP amounted to a $225 billion error – people rightly conclude their models are fundamentally flawed. Given the similar scales involved, there is no reason evolutionary biologists should not be held to the same standard.

8. As I wrote in my previous post, this is just another demonstration of the intrinsic unfalsifiability of the butterfly collector’s art. When he’s wrong, when a bird is not a bird or a transitional species, but merely another dinosaur, it really means he’s more right than ever! This is ridiculous. When I said that Hillary Clinton would win the 2008 Democratic nomination, it did not make me more right than ever when Obama actually won it. It made me wrong.

As for the supposedly damning big picture, I am perfectly content to await further developments. I further note that as those “huge volumes of information” continue to expand, the evolutionary theorists have been forced to concoct ever more complicated and grandiose evolutionary epicycles to attempt to keep Darwin in the picture. Both the core concepts of “species” and “natural selection” have been increasingly called into question by advances in genetics, and it will not surprise me if further advances force the eventual junking of TENS in any of its reasonably recognizable forms.

Still, just to be clear, I am not, nor have I ever been, an evolution denier. I am merely a strong evolution skeptic, and it is worth noting that my perceptive and public doubts about natural selection are increasingly being supported by firm believers in TE(p)NSBMGDaGF. One of the many reasons that I remain confirmed in my skepticism to date is the constant historical revisionism of PZ Myers and many other True Believers in the cult of Darwin as well as their staunch refusal to abide by the same standards of evidence that even the practitioners of an arcane quasi-science like economics do.

As an added bonus, these three comments from the astute economic observers at Pharyngula will likely provide considerably entertainment to those who have read The Return of the Great Depression.

“Well, you gotta give him credit for consistency. He is all wrong about Keynesian economics, too. It is the neo-Keynsians, not the freshwater types, whose models have correctly predicted the economic mess we are in today. The evidence (completely ignored by what Krugman calls the “Very Serious People) is pretty clear about this.”
– SES

I’d trust Vox Day on economics as much as I do on science. Zero.
– Raven

One notes the comparison with pleasure. Keynesian economics, like evolutionary biology, has an outstanding record of success, and has become the foundation for a vast amount of productive work in its field.
– JRE


“When I’m wrong it proves I’m right”

Those who make ridiculous assertions that amount to this line of logic should not find it terribly hard to understand why those of us who actually possess working memories tend to be just a little bit skeptical about the reliability of whatever their current positions happen to be. I know you are probably as shocked as I am that the Fowl Atheist is claiming that the “reevaluation” of Archaeopteryx, the fossil that has been hailed as literally rock-solid proof of evolution since I was being subjected to evolutionary propaganda back in elementary school, doesn’t mean that the legitimacy of either archeological science or TE(p)NSBMGDaGF should be called into question:

We all knew this was coming. Xiaotingia, the newly described feathered dinosaur, suggests a reevaluation of the taxonomic status of Archaeopteryx, so the creationists are stumbling all over each other to crow about the failure of science…which doesn’t make any sense, since reconsidering hypotheses in the light of new evidence is exactly what science is supposed to do.

That’s an interesting claim. Precisely when has any evolutionist reconsidered either a) the basic hypothesis that species evolve into different species through natural selection or b) the corollary and requisite hypothesis that life evolved from non-life, as a result of the falsity of one, ten, or even a hundred predictions that relied upon one or both of them? If it weren’t for DNA, which was not discovered or developed with any assistance from evolutionary theory, evolutionary biology would already be openly recognized by every intelligent, rational, science-literate individual as being about as useful as phrenology and astrology.

Darwinian biologists are very much like Keynesian economists. It doesn’t matter how many times their predictions fail. It doesn’t matter how often their models are proven to be wildly wrong. It doesn’t matter how many times they have been wrong in the past even with the benefit of margins of error consisting of millions of years. They continue to insist that their position is based on evidence even when the evidence demonstrates precisely the opposite of what they have been claiming.

An evolutionist is one who is continually convinced, despite past experience, that adding just one more series of magic evolutionary epicycles will somehow make the whole system finally begin to function in a coherent and reliably predictive manner.

In other, somewhat tangential news, we have discovered that the New Atheist Circle Jerk continues unabated. Seriously, you can’t even parody these charlatans without them one-upping you.

The 2011 Richard Dawkins Award goes to…
Category: Godlessness

Who else but Christopher Hitchens?

What a beautiful, beautiful thing. If I had dared to invent the idea, no one would have believed me. Out of nearly seven billion people on the planet, Richard Dawkins chose to give out his eponymous award to the third-most amusing recipient. Second, you understand, would have been awarding it to himself. But to maximize our collective utility on the happiness-suffering metric, though, he would have had to present the award to Rebecca Watson.


Ignoring the elephant

In which the New York Times is astounded to discover that poverty isn’t to blame for substandard intellectual achievement:

An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented — a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another. But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.

The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.

Although the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been previously reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls “jaw-dropping data” in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency….

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

It is truly remarkable what lengths some people will go in order to avoid the conclusion that is not so much staring them in the face as smashing in their teeth. While there are sociological factors involved – that 72% illegitimacy rate probably doesn’t help foster the development of black mathematicians – it’s more than a little absurd to insist that every group across the human race has precisely the same intellectual capacity. They don’t. This is an observable fact and would be an accepted scientific fact as well if scientists would focus on science instead of politics.

The current state of science is such a joke that it borders on parody. All the charlatans who want to pontificate about the holy theoretical mechanism behind the origin of the species are deathly afraid to admit to the obvious conclusions dictated by that mechanism while sociologists search desperately for an alternative to the completely obvious. If you’ve got one kid who is reading Tolstoy at five and another one who can’t sound out the word CAT, there is a very high probability that the first kid is significantly more intelligent than the second one.


Applying science to string theory

What a novel idea!

String theory was originally developed to describe the fundamental particles and forces that make up our universe. The new research, led by a team from Imperial College London, describes the unexpected discovery that string theory also seems to predict the behaviour of entangled quantum particles. As this prediction can be tested in the laboratory, researchers can now test string theory.

Of course it seems probable that if the prediction is incorrect, the string theoreticians will follow the example of the Darwinists and insist that string theory is still totally scientific and totally accurate even though every attempt to utilize it to make predictions keep showing it to be reliably incorrect. When even Richard Dawkins feels the need to start using qualifiers in his would-be magnum opus in defense of the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection, henceforth TEpNS, only the most fanatic Darwinist could fail to recognize that there is a very real possibility that the theory’s future lies with space aether, phrenology, and phlogistons.


Darwinianism and evolution

The vehement objections of those who believe in the evolution of the species notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that Darwinianism is a religious cult of faith. This is a simple and provable matter of observable evidence. But the key is to understand what “Darwinianism” means, for as is all too often the case, the atheists who subscribe to Darwinianism engage in their usual bait-and-switch by hiding their philosophical beliefs behind a false veneer of science. So, when the Darwinian denies that belief in the ever-mutating biological theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection is a religion, he is absolutely correct. And yet, the denial is irrelevant. This is because the Darwinian cult has its foundations in the biological theory, but cannot legitimately be conflated with it.

Consider one of the first great prophets of Darwinianism, Herbert Spencer, who stated that “Evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness.” In Revoking the Moral Order, David J. Peterson writes:

Spencer taught further that society embodied a self-perfecting process…. Using his own “scientific” methodology which he dubbed “reasoning by analysis” he concluded that creating the ideal man biologically was analogous to bringing about the ideal state of society; a realization of utopia.

Herbert Spencer, if you do not recognize his name, was the founder of “Social Darwinism”, which has absolutely nothing to do with the heartless, Dickens-era capitalist connotations applied to it today. It is, instead, the religion to which today’s New Atheists and progressives subscribe. This means it is entirely correct to describe a Darwinian as possessing “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe”, or in other words, as possessing religious faith. However, keep in mind that the mere belief in the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection is not alone sufficient to make one a Darwinian. That requires a belief in evolution-driven progress towards an eventual end of one sort or another.

To say that a fish evolved into an amphibian is to be an evolutionist. To say that Man has evolved beyond traditional morals is to be a Darwinian. The distinction is an important one, as is least a biological quasi-science whereas the latter is nothing more than a secular religion.


Human evolution observed in the wild

After only 150 years, Man finally witnesses evolution from one distinct species into another:

A dragon-sized, fruit-eating lizard that lives in the trees on the northern Philippines island of Luzon has been confirmed as a new species, scientists reported on Tuesday. Hunted for its tasty flesh, the brightly colored forest monitor lizard can grow to more than six feet in length but weighs only about 22 pounds (10 kg), said Rafe Brown of the University of Kansas, whose team confirmed the find.

“It lives up in trees, so it can’t get as massive as the Komodo dragon, a huge thing that eats large amounts of fresh meat,” Brown said by telephone. “This thing is a fruit-eater and it’s only the third fruit-eating lizard in the world.”

I think it’s remarkable proof of the power of natural selection. And to think that it only takes three generations for homo sapiens to evolve into draco arboris! No doubt the families of those missing Japanese soldiers will not only be relieved to know the ultimate fate of their loved ones, but proud to know that both the Sakurakai and Shintaro Ishihara were right and the Japanese are, in fact, the most highly evolved form of Man on the planet.

Of course, we had better wipe these dragons out at once before the pressure placed upon them by quasi-cannibalistic Philippinos causes them to evolve the ability to breathe fire. And in other evolution news, the Missing Link was found again. What are the odds that it lasts longer than last year’s extraordinary fossil find, Ida?


A science teacher responds

Scott Hatfield replies to my post supporting his call to reject a proposal to further federalize education:

Vox’s reply is interesting and wide-ranging. I can only touch on a few points (in fact, three) that might be said to fall in my area of knowledge. Vox writes:

“I’m curious to know how Scott would prefer to see teachers evaluated.”

This is a thorny question, in that there are political realities at work. Most teachers are affiliated with teacher’s unions which tend to resist objective measures tied to student performance on standardized tests, for reasons that Vox acknowledges. Unfortunately, many unions tend to resist objective measures in general, and many educational professionals in administration and in government are so wedded to ‘standards-based reform’ that considering a different approach is unlikely to occur during my teaching career. I’m not punting, you understand, just acknowledging that there are practical reasons why we have the impasse that presently exists in terms of assessing instructor performance.

One of the things I enjoy about discourse with Scott is that unlike so many other evolutionists, he is open to the possibility that skepticism about TENS is not intrinsically related to one’s religious faith; this happens to be a position that is also in accord with the observable fact of numerous irreligious evolutionary skeptics. Nevertheless, I have to take some small exception to Scott’s belief that I misread the 8a of the California standards, specifically the second sentence quoted: “Students know how natural selection determines the differential survival of groups of organisms.” Because there is insufficient scientific evidence to indicate that natural selection even exists beyond the tautological level, I don’t see how anyone, let alone students, can presently know how it determines the differential survival of anything, including groups of organisms.

And in the interest of forestalling all the poorly read evolutionists who will be tempted to claim that I don’t understand the science due to their failure to keep up on the latest research, please note that the erroneous basis of most of the evidence presently cited in support of natural selection isn’t something you should take up with me, but rather, with Masatoshi Nei, Shozo Yokoyama, and Yoshiyuki Suzuki. And yes, I know they still believe in natural selection despite their criticism of the statistical evidence, but then, their personal opinions are neither science nor the point.