Isn’t this fun…I got email from a creationist today; it was also sent to a lot of other people. Joe Hannon wants Mike Pence to outlaw the teaching of evolution.
Dear All,
Howdie. I thought you might be interested to read a fresh online petition which is directed at VP-elect Mike Pence calling on the incoming Trump Adminstration to impose an immediate,unconditional and indefinite nationwide moratorium on the teaching of evolution in public schools, including the threat of crippling financial sanctions on those schools that do not fully comply with this proposed executive action: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/moratorium-teaching-evolution
However, the real business will begin when Congress reconvenes on Jan 3rd. We will be speaking with Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN) who heads the House Education Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education. We will be asking for his subcommittee to approve a similar measure as an amendment to a House bill on education in 2017. Hopefully, the incoming Trump-Pence Administration will let high school students learn actual biology without the flawed narrative of evolutionism forced down their throats.
Merry Christmas to y’all,
Joe Hannon
Republicans Abroad (Make America Great Again)
He has a petition! It has two signatories so far: Joe Hannon and Uriah Wanker. That’s how serious this is. He has the backing of Wankers.
Well, let’s take a look at this petition. He has three primary arguments that he believes invalidate evolutionary theory.
1. The demise of the genetic blueprint: The majority of high school textbooks, along with the popular media, refer to DNA as a “blueprint” for building a living organism. This is taught because the Neo-Darwinian paradigm insists that the diversity of form in the biosphere is due to variations in DNA among species. However, this assumption has been shown in recent years to be essentially false, and that there is no blueprint in the genome governing the shape and complexity of the organism. Two researchers, Monteiro and Podlaha, admit that,“the genetic origin of new and complex traits is probably still one of the most pertinent and fundamental unanswered questions in evolution today.” Harvard professor, Peter Park, goes even further to proclaim that,“it’s become very clear that DNA sequences are just a building block. They don’t explain higher-order complexity.” Obviously, if organisms are more than just the epiphenomena of their genes, then the gene-centric Neo-Darwinian paradigm cannot at all explain the diversity of form and so fails utterly.
The “genetic blueprint” is a metaphor. The metaphor doesn’t work. The failure of a metaphor is not the failure of the fact of evolution.
Monteiro and Podlaha will be surprised to learn that their work is being cited as evidence of the collapse of Darwinism (actually, I think all scientists would be surprised to be told that the existence of unanswered questions means science has failed.) I don’t think Hannon understood the paper, if he read it all. The authors were setting up a specific question:
This work is difficult and time consuming, but the question at its core—the genetic origin of new and complex traits—is probably still one of the most pertinent and fundamental unanswered questions in evolution today. At stake is the possibility of testing whether novel complex traits arise from a gradual building of novel developmental networks, gene by gene, or whether pre-existent modules of interacting genes are recruited together to play novel roles in novel parts of the organism.
Hannon left out the part where they explain that they are asking whether novel traits evolve by incremental construction of new gene networks, or whether they evolve by cooption of an existing network for a new purpose. Whether a god magicked them into existence isn’t one of the choices.
2. The demise of cumulative selectionism: The core premise of Darwin’s theory of evolution is that biological features have been produced by the cumulative selection of innumerable slight successive modifications. But as renown biologist Dr. Michael Denton has noted, the theory of evolution has been in crisis for the past 30 years because of the abject failure to show that there is a functional continuum in biology that allows for a gradual change leading to complex new features. In his view,“Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth.”
Quite wrong. Critics have been predicting the imminent death of Darwinism since the day Darwin published it. Like their biblical prophecies, it never seems to come true.
As for the absence of a functional continuum — look to transitional fossils. There are plenty of examples.
3. The demise of the LUCA: The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) is the hypothetical organism, that lived 4 billion years ago, for which there is no actual physical evidence of at all. It is only inferred because all life shares essentially the same genetic code. Recent scientific research indicates there is no reason to believe that it ever existed. As Professor Ford Doolittle states, “We do doubt that there ever was a single universal common ancestor.” Indeed, the idea that all living organisms are descended from a single ancestor is as preposterous as the discredited hypothesis that all human languages are descended from a prototypical tongue.
Correct. There was no single universal common ancestor. Again, all you have to do is read the original source to see that Joe is selectively editing and lying about the context of the quote.
We (some of us) do doubt that there ever was a single universal common ancestor (a last universal common ancestor or LUCA), if by that is meant a single cell whose genome harboured predecessors of all the genes to be found in all the genomes of all cells alive today. But this does not mean that life lacks ‘universal common ancestry’—no more than the fact that mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome phylogenies do not trace back to a single conjugal couple named Eve and Adam whose loins bore all the genes we humans share today means that members of Homo sapiens lack common ancestry.
So, bottom line: his case is a concatenation of lies, ignorance, and quote-mining. Standard creationist crap, in other words. Mike Pence will eat it up. Uriah Wanker will also find it copacetic.
Uh-oh. Now Vladimir Puttin has signed off on it, too.
So I’m pretty dense – “Uriah Wanker” is a joke name right? Like if someone signed it “Seymour Butz” or “Amanda Huggenkis”, right?
Maybe Michael Behe’s career will get a nice kickstart.
It would be fun if science education wasn’t under serious threat the coming years. A Trump administration will be well capable of imposing a moratorium on teaching evolution.
*funny
The concept teaching biology without being encumbered with evolution is hilarious.
For my next trick I am going to show how to do computing without the integrated circuits and electronics; Get your slide rules, trig tables, pencil and paper at the ready.
Only when he signs my petition that calls for an immediate,unconditional and indefinite nationwide moratorium on the teaching of electricity and gravity in public schools. I’m pretty sure, given his political agenda, that President Putin will sign my petition within short notice.
reading those arguments I pivot them as reasons FOR teaching evolution. Double pivot it back at them as “teach the controversy”.
They™ use the phrase as argument to teach only their side. If it’s a controversy, one needs to hear both ides, not just the ephemeral one.
@6: there is lots of value to calculating without electronic assistance. paper and slide rules !rule!
Calculators are just easy convenience gadgets. Teaching requires the brain to be involved and not just the fingers. All hail Tpyos, as the big detriment to calculators.
re @7
like denialists thinking climate change is just a legislative misrule that can be easily remanded, The Law of Gravity can simply be repealed.
Repeal Law of Gravity, you Legislative hacks.!1!1!!!1! petition is on the way. calling change.org.
@jerthebarbarian #2:
Yes. Read “Uriah” as “You are a”.
This is in no way analogous to teaching biology without evolution. Computing without electronic computers is, in fact, historically the norm; I myself am old enough to still have been taught how to use a slide rule, trig tables, et al as part of my high school science and maths courses. With only a few years previously had been used to land people on the moon.
@8
I know that the original ‘computers’ were actually human beings carrying out manual calculations in a pre-electronic age.
My comparison was trying to say that do any meaningful biology without evolution would be similar to going back to the pre-electronic computing days.
Sure you could get some meaningful work done and understanding but there is stuff that you are never going to be able to do without using the full tools at your disposable.
Incidentally, never actually used a slide rule. Electronic calculators had just become affordable enough for most school kids to have one when I was learning maths.
A perhaps better comparison might be to playing baseball using the stage directions for Hamlet as the rules. Something will happen, but it is neither baseball nor Shakespeare.
Several more signatories…up to 18 now. Lots of support for the Earth as the center of the Universe…
[preaching to the choir] The Earth is a speck floating a sea of star debris. It is NOT the physical center, only the center of our awareness, our concern, our attention. It is only the mote we float on, nothing more. nevermore. ? [eom]
Here’s an idea; let scientists decide what is taught as science in schools and don’t let fringe cranks and scientifically illiterate religious fanatics intrude on science.
Evolution isn’t just some accessory to biology that can be discarded and ignored. It’s the essential core of all of modern biology. If you try to learn biology without learning about evolution, you’re going to be a shitty biologist. This asshole wouldn’t know real biology if it jumped up and bit him on the ass.
I don’t see how said nationwide ban is supposed to be enforcible. Less than half of the population are creationists, and almost all of the biologists in the country accept evolution as reality. I can imagine a huge number of students, parents, teachers, scientists, and whole schools and universities across the country refusing to comply with any attempt to outlaw the teaching of evolution. Schools in conservative areas didn’t stop teaching creationism because of the Dover trial, and schools in progressive areas aren’t going to stop teaching evolutionary biology because of anything like this.
Nevertheless, I think that it’s important that biologists and those who care about biology education fight any attempt to put something like this into place. Any attempt by Pence or thosen who think like him need to be vigorously opposed. We should prepare for some major legal battles soon.
My computer science curriculum from undergrad to postdoc didn’t cover transistors and integrated circuits at all. We talked a bit about logic gates.
Occasionally we’d peer over the fence at what crazy things the chip engineers were doing, but that was geeky interest, about as relevant as rocket science, musicals, board games, or rock climbing (for other common pursuits in computer science departments).
Computing without discusssing models of computation, or algorithms — now you’d be in an analogous setting.
Suck it up, liberal biologists. Y’all gonna end up in those FEMA concentration camps y’all don’t believe exist.
—
NB. Is the second y’all grammatical? I’m trying to learn American here.
Rich Woods
No, the second instance should be “those FEMA concentration camps all y’all don’t believe in.”.
emergence wrote:
That’s the point of the mentioned in the letter. The threat is intended to be, stop teaching evolution, or your school will lose all funding. Plenty of administrators within those schools, even in progressive areas, are likely to look at that law and insist their teachers sidestep the teaching of evolution altogether, or just cancel all high school biology courses completely. This would be a huge boon to charter schools, which have little to no problem with compromising, and would likely end up exempt from the law anyway (because ).
Re: Emergence (#16):
Whether they can be enforced effectively or not it beside the point with laws such as this. If topic X is now, by law, out of bounds to scientific research, that’s it for all funding from the state. Anyone’s research (or teaching career) even remotely related to X is pretty much over. Okay, researchers might get funding from other sources but, hang on, isn’t that illegal now? Awkward.
Anyroad, aren’t unenforcible laws a staple of any good fascist state? How can people denounce their neighbours if there aren’t any laws to break? Insane laws are vital, and if they concern topics that really rile up the fanatic wing of the population (i.e. evolution, birth control, …) they work even better. “Officer, our little girl said she learned about ‘evilution’ in school today.” Bam, one uppity teacher out of a job and in serious trouble. Their successor will be much more careful about what they teach to kids. They probably won’t touch anything that might upset the state or its loyal citizens.
I live in and used to teach in Texas. Several years ago, one of my colleagues who was an excellent biology teacher was forced to leave the school for unapologetic-ally teaching evolution. It began with complaints from parents, progressed to administrators closely monitoring his classroom and ended with him being told that his contract would not be renewed. His wife was given the same treatment in a local middle school. They chose to pack up and move back to a blue state.
More recently, my grandson’s class was told by a biology teacher that the section in the textbook on evolution was wrong, but that the students should read it and answer the questions in case such questions showed up on the standardized test. Our brave grandson objected and argued with the teacher.
It will be very easy for school districts in red states such as this one to wipe out the teaching of evolution in K-12. It might be a bit more difficult on the college level, but I can see the threat of withdrawing funding working there, too.
I’m placing my hope in blue states like California. Governor Brown has already taunted the future Trump administration and vowed that his state will welcome and protect science researchers and their work. Otherwise, all of our best scientists and educators are going to be leaving the country.
Odd how local control of education goes right out the window when one of theirs is in charge.
Also this:
Presumably he mean a “proto-language”, and I guess he’s referring to proto-world. It’s true that attempts to reconstruct proto-world, or even intermediate forms like “Nostratic”, are pretty much not accepted by most linguists, but that doesn’t mean the monogenesis hypothesis itself has been discredited*. It’s certainly plausible given the state of our knowledge, but we’ll probably never have any meaningful way to test it or an alternative polygenesis hypothesis.
Good discussion of it here.
*That is, if the discussion is limited to spoken languages. Signed languages clearly do not derive from spoken languages. But I doubt that’s what our hero was talking about.
What a Maroon@24, Your link is borked (missing entirely, it looks like?).
Trying again. If that doesn’t work, it’s http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/682/monogenesis-vs-polygenesis.
Thanks, blf.
magistramarla @22
Good news for me then, since I live in California. I’m actually a university biology student and I just finished my evolutionary biology class this semester. I should probably try to take as many classes dealing with evolution as I can while they’re still guaranteed to be available. I hope that you’re right about my state resisting political intrusion into science classes. I plan on doing everything I can at my own university to keep it from degenerating.
I actually like the idea of California becoming a sanctuary for legitimate science and social progress. Hopefully any regressive thugs we have in the state will either leave for red states or seclude themselves off somewhere in the state where they won’t bother us.
What a Maroon, living up to the ‘nym wrote:
Yep. Local control and states’ rights tend to vanish when a state does something the right dislikes, or won’t do something they want. They only do the states’ rights thing when it’s most convenient.
Also, this is something that always bothers me and I feel like I have to point it out every time this happens; the guy who made this petition is another dirty thief who appropriated the research of real scientists to prop up his ideology. Creationists barely ever rely on original research for their claims. Usually, they just steal research from evolutionary biologists and then distort it to claim that it supports creationism when it really doesn’t.
Why is it always “forced down their throats”? Is that part of the creationist script? Is there some weird fetish involved?
That’s a gap that, since there is no science involved, it seems their god will have to fill.
Look, if the right-wing wants to turn the USA into 3rd world country, an ideological war on science is a damn good way to get the ball rolling. Pointing out that the states that already do this shit are the poorest, least educated, crime-ridden dumps in the US goes so far over their heads it doesn’t even part their hair.
@Nemo #10
Yes, I translated “Uriah” too as “You Are A.”
Signed, his brother, Heizza
“Evolution isn’t just some accessory to biology that can be discarded and ignored. It’s the essential core of all of modern biology. If you try to learn biology without learning about evolution, you’re going to be a shitty biologist.”
In many countries, including Western ones, evolution is not even on the biology syllabus. This is because it is treated as an interesting theory of origins, like the Big Bang, but not as a foundational discipline. You can teach respiration, digestion, photosynthesis, phagocytosis, cytokinesis, homeostasis, genetics without any reference to evolutionary concepts. It just isn’t necessary whereas you couldn’t teach chemistry without reference to atomic theory. You couldn’t also teach mechanics without reference to the theory of gravity. There were biologists before Darwin, Robert Hooke was one of them.
“That’s the point of the “crippling financial sanctions” mentioned in the letter. The threat is intended to be, stop teaching evolution, or your school will lose all funding.”
Right. Republican lawmakers managed to get Iran to dismantle much of its nuclear program – but not enough of it – by imposing crippling financial sanctions against the rogue regime in Tehran. Sanctions do work. Many schools cannot surive on local and state funding and need assistance from the federal government. If they persist in teaching Darwinism, then funding will be denied and they won’t be able to afford loo paper, let alone textbooks. So, it isn’t about criminalising/outlawing the teaching of evolution but, rather, putting a very high financial price on continuing to do so.
“Look, if the right-wing wants to turn the USA into 3rd world country, an ideological war on science is a damn good way to get the ball rolling.”
Seriously, how would stopping teaching Darwinism cause America to become a third world country? Would we no longer be able to make cars, planes, integrated circuits and Wifi-enabled devices? Don’t be silly. The Biotech sector might be concerned, true, but we can still teach adaptation, mutation, natural selection etc as part of ecology/genetics without any reference to Evolutionism per se. Creationists accept the reality of observable limited biological change just as much as Darwinists.
@36,
“Seriously, how would stopping teaching Darwinism cause America to become a third world country?”
If you look at things like incarceration and crime rates, vast swathes of Yankistan are already third-world. And it’s only getting worse from here.
“I don’t think so Tim”.
Darwinists tend to be a pejorative used by creationists and IDiots.
Creationists don’t like science in any form, as it ignores their imaginary deity.
@ Joseph Gannon
You realize that I said that you would be a shitty biologist if you didn’t learn evolution, right? You may be able to learn anatomy, genetics, cell biology, etc., but you’ll still have a gaping hole in your knowledge of biology that’s going to negatively impact your work.
This is especially apparent when it comes to population genetics and fields of biology that deal with it. I can’t imagine how you could study ecology, infectious diseases, agricultural pests, animals that act as disease vectors, or any other aspect of the biosphere that humans interact with without understanding evolution.
In order to pretend that large evolutionary changes don’t take place, creationists have to distort and misrepresent how small evolutionary changes work. You can’t adequately study the fields I discussed earlier without acknowledging that mutations aren’t always negative or never result in the formation of new genetic material.
Even if creationists accepted all of the genetic processes that underlie observed changes in populations of organisms, rejecting the existence of large evolutionary changes would still be untenable. The same processes of mutation, natural selection, genetic drift, sexual selection, and so on that explain observable changes in populations of organisms are also responsible for large-scale evolutionary changes over long periods of time. Acknowledging the former while denying the latter is just cognitive dissonance.
@emergence
“I can’t imagine how you could study ecology, infectious diseases, agricultural pests, animals that act as disease vectors, or any other aspect of the biosphere that humans interact with without understanding evolution.”
Read the petition, pal. It allows for and encourages the teaching of mutation, natural selection, adaptation etc as part of a course on ecology or genetics. What it precludes is the teaching of Evolutionism-Darwinism, an ideological atheistic/deistic philosophy, which asserts that all life is related through common descent and that the diversity of life is due to a blind, purposeless and unplanned process (a theological and not scientific position). I do want my kids to learn about antibiotic resistance in bacteria, and the failure of modern medicine to deal with this problem, but I don’t want my kids being taught that they are walking sarcopterygian fish or that they are synapsid amniotes or the like.
I’m sure Putin would be in favor of this, considering the impact that Lysenkoism had on Russian competence in the field of Biology. I’ve read for a long time that advances in biological sciences would be the next Internet (i.e. technology boom). Would be just like us to shoot ourselves in the foot this way.
rietpluim @ 4;
Exactly – this is the Trump/Pence administration we are talking about here. It is sadly entirely possible that they will try to impose just such a ban, especially if Trump thinks there is money and/or votes in it down the line. It is hardly as though their sense of civic responsibility (or common human decency; I am thoroughly convinced that they lack even so much as an ounce of such sentiment between them) would hold them back. In a few short days time, and throughout the (at least) four years that follow, none of us are likely to be laughing about any of this.
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ck, the Irate Lump @ 20;
You are forgetting that these are US religious conservatives we are talking about here – concentrated hypocrisy in human form – and they will do what they always do when ever this type of conflict in their ideology comes up; they will move the goal posts. In the same way as they are all committed believers in the absolute necessity of small (to non-existent) government in every sphere of life except other people’s bedrooms, they will similarly demand that government stay out of the running of educational businesses… except where those businesses are clearly being run by ‘evil-utionists’, who are probably Muslim-atheist-terrorist-Commies (because reasons) undeserving of the mantle of (bought and paid for) Capitalistic freedom anyway, and so the government must intervene to protect the right of Creationists to have their a-scientific lies left unchallenged so that they might brainwash the next generation in peace.
Like every other principle they claim hold to, the business autonomy they are so happy to use an excuse to undermine the freedom and rights of others is only sacrosanct to them so long as it serves their religious and social agenda. Should it come into conflict with their aims, suddenly the immovable object becomes an eminently moveable feast.
The link I added didn’t seem to work. It was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism.
Why would you not want them taught that they are synapsid amniotes? Why are you afraid of your kids learning that they are related to other species? Do you just feel that you aren’t special enough otherwise?
PZ Myers claims it is OK that science does not have all the answers. Granted. But if Darwinism doesn’t appear able to answer something as fundamental as where new and complex traits come from, then it isn’t much of a theory. Yes, many researchers think that tweaking gene networks is all it takes, but the reality is that most complex traits aren’t necessarily genetic in origin and so gene-centric Neo-Darwinism is useless as an explanatory paradigm.
@Rowen
“Why would you not want them taught that they are synapsid amniotes?”
Because it is a farcical claim, although not as ridiculous as humans being modified walking fish. Stick to the basics of biology and avoid this mumbo-evo-jumbo.
But it’s nor farcical at all? It’s certainly less farcical than “There’s this invisible superman who created the entire universe, but couldn’t be bothered to create unrelated animals so he just re-used the same basic body plans and DNA over and over and he’s all powerful but he’ll never actually show himself and we know all this because we have this book that was written by people, happens to say weird things such as bats being birds, and this book is totally true, because it says its true, but all the other religious books that say they’re true are actually false, because our book is true because it says so”.
DNA shows clear relations, as does biology, plus we have the fossil record showing, chronologically, the arrival of new clades. There’s also, for example, the ability for new and old world camelids to produce offspring (requires artificial insemination because siiiiize difffffference), which shows that they are related fairly closely.
Do you also not teach your children that they are mammals?
I assume Mr. Hannon also advocates throwing out large chunks of the rest of modern science, like the Universe being 14 some billion years old.
First of all, I doubt that you even understand the models that biologists have constructed that explain how new gene networks form. How about you let actual biologists determine whether or not a particular model can explain the genetic structure of life on Earth?
From what I’ve learned over the past few months, evolution seems like a perfectly acceptable explanation for the patterns we observe in the genomes of living organisms. For example, gene duplication followed by further mutation in the copied genes makes a lot of sense as the source of the families of sequentially similar genes we find.
I should also point out something that you ignored; you just want to accept the parts of evolution that are useful and don’t conflict with your religion while ignoring what it would mean for those processes to be operating over longer timescales. I think that on some level you realize this, and that’s why you people try to come up with ad hoc roadblocks that limit how much organisms can evolve. By doing that, you have to butcher our understanding of the very processes you say that you want to still be taught.
You creationists have absolutely no right to call evolution ridiculous when your explanation involves literal miracles. Saying that life was just magically poofed into existence all at once by an all-powerful wizard from another dimension is far more useless an explanation than an actual natural process that can be described mathematically and have its mechanisms described.
Right now, I’m studying to become a biologist at a university. I chose to study biology because I find the biosphere fascinating and want to learn about it, and possibly use it to better humanity. I don’t think that you or your fellow fundamentalist stooges give two shits about biology. You just want to force science to conform to your medieval notions of how the world works. I’m not going to let you. If you think that you’re going to be able to use the next four years to steamroll over academia and have your doctrine imposed on students like me, you’re sorely mistaken.
@Rowen
“DNA shows clear relations, as does biology, plus we have the fossil record showing, chronologically, the arrival of new clades. There’s also, for example, the ability for new and old world camelids to produce offspring (requires artificial insemination because siiiiize difffffference), which shows that they are related fairly closely.”
Camelids are one of the same created kind, so we shouldn’t be surprised by this. The Darwinist claim goes beyond this. It claims that camelids are closely related to cetaceans whose ancestors jumped into the Indus river and gradually acquired blowholes, flukes and sonar-based echolocation…..through random mistakes in their DNA. That’s science fiction, not fact. You are free to believe it, but it is your faith, not mine.
@emergence
“You just want to accept the parts of evolution that are useful and don’t conflict with your religion while ignoring what it would mean for those processes to be operating over longer timescales.”
I accept microevolution, adaptation and speciation. These have been observed and are testable. All creationists accept this. I don’t accept the *BELIEF* that all living organisms are related through universal common ancestry, and that the diversity of life is due to a blind, purposeless and unplanned process involving the accumulation of random copying errors in DNA. There is inusffucient evidence to verify this claim, but there is sufficient evidence to falsify it
@Hannon on 59:
I think you misstated the lineage of cetaceans a bit. Here’s a helpful reference, with both cetacean ancestors and a timeline.
Ah, the Darwinist tell is told. The science fiction is your imaginary creator. You believe. I conclude based on the evidence.
The fact the you can’t show your creator, and only presuppose it, makes if YOUR fiction.
@ John Hannon
I’ve said this multiple times, but you’ve just ignored it; the processes that you accept underlie microevolution, speciation, and macroevolution! You want to have your cake and eat it, wallowing in cognitive dissonance and refusing to consider the wider implications of the science. You’re asking every biologist who works with population genetics to engage in doublethink and ad hoc special pleading. I’m not going to do that just to make a bunch of fundamentalist Christians happy.
Assertion without evidence, dismissed as religious fuckwittery.
Until you demonstrate the conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity, physical evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin, it doesn’t exist. And the evidence to date is the non-existence of your imaginary deity.
@Emergence
“I’ve said this multiple times, but you’ve just ignored it; the processes that you accept underlie microevolution, speciation, and macroevolution! You want to have your cake and eat it, wallowing in cognitive dissonance and refusing to consider the wider implications of the science. You’re asking every biologist who works with population genetics to engage in doublethink and ad hoc special pleading. I’m not going to do that just to make a bunch of fundamentalist Christians happy.”
This is a classic logical fallacy but you are still young so I forgive thee. Because natural selection and random mutation can explains *some* relatively small changes in living organisms, you can’t then extrapolate from this and say that it can explain *all* of the major differences among living organisms, This is epecially true because very often biological adaptation involves the *loss* of functions or traits: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3708842/
@50: “I accept microevolution, adaptation and speciation.”
Just like you accept the step, but not the stairway.
https://sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/the-scientific-case-against-stairs/
@ 1 PZ Myers
Uh-oh. Now Vladimir Putin has signed off on it, too.
Let’s not be completely ridiculous. Trump perhaps but Putin is not a US Republican. He actually can think and he makes jokes such as calling Trump “brilliant”. Note Putin used “яркий” which is more like “flamboyant” than “egg-head”.
Oh wait a minute. Support Trump, Trump selects Pence as running mate, Pence lobbies to to cease teaching evolution, Trump appoints mad billionaire who hates public education as head of Dept of Education (or whatever you call it), continuing collapse of US educational system accelerates. US, lacking educated statesmen, scientists and civic leaders, goes into steep decline.
Putin is brilliant and truly Machiavellian! Plaudits from around the world ensue. I can see a Nobel Peace Prize in his future.
Gee, evolutionists admit that RM/NS is only one of the ways evolution works. You don’t know enough about it, because you think Darwin is evolutionists god, and his Origin of the Species is our holy book. Much progress has been made since Darwin, who had the basic idea right, but he had problems with his mechanism of heredity. The genome shows us the relationship of all life.
Science, unlike religion, will fix its mistakes and move forward toward the truth. As science has been doing in biology in the 150 years since Darwin.
Err, Putin is brilliant where brilliant perhaps is выдающийся or одаренность not яркий if I am reading Google Translate correctly
@JH
Speciation without ancestry. No precestry, just the forecestry. Afterwards. I can’t quite follow you.
Having read Darwin’s Origin, I too think we should embrace our post-Darwinian era. One where things like genetics, the geologic column and universal common ancestry are more than the speculative hypotheticals Darwin had to rely on. His third edition is edifying in that it encludes a rebuttal to every current (and past) creationist argument, anticipating and counteracting with points today proven over and over again by the data.
@Joseph Hannon #49
Again, as at Darwin’s time, you deny variation.
If indeed any slight change in DNA were a “mistake” (and there were some original, primordial “perfect” DNA, which is your implicit hypothesis here), then the world’s organisms would be truly toast. The reality we live in however shows that organisms are born inherantly variable. Each generation contains variation which we now know to be due to its changing gene pool and the passage of time ensures that these variations accumulate. We have the fossils to document it historically and the genetics to explain it as a process.
You yourself possess a whole number of those “mistakes”, your DNA is different from your parents, and theirs from their parents. The fact that you stubbornly cling to notions of superiority and deny your own history is your own psychological failing, not a problem for biology.
Creationism is such a weak concept that it needs legislation to suppress what it considers to be competition. Chicken shit cowards…
I know a Dr Heywood Jablowme who is going to sign. (It’s pronounced ya-blow-may.)
Vladimir Puttin, but Igor’s using the 8 iron.
That’s because yer a blooming idjit.
Glad I could help.
There might be some chicanery going on with the signatures on that petition. For instance, Mr. Hugh Jass appears to have signed it twice.
Science laughs at your notion of a created kind. Camelids are not closely related to cetaceans. The closest living animal related to Cetaceans is the hippopotamus, which is clearly aquatic, and not native to India. The creationist claims were refuted long ago, and no matter what you believe, the bones and DNA don’t lie. (unlike those uber-moral creationists.)
That’s very cheeky of him.
@What a Maroon:
Probably… though “very” is rather vague. Do you think it’s as much as double-cheeky of Mr Jass?
Crip Dyke,
So imagine there’s a car. And the car has two cheeks. And the cheeks fart. What does that tell you about the existence of beans?
Nothing. But it does say something about the bacteria that produce alpha-galactosidase enzymes that digest certain plant arabino-galactans with methane as a by-product. ;)
Oh no, not the “of course I accept micro evolution but not macro evolution” crap again.
Creationists can never think of new arguments, can they?
@rietpluim
It’s kinda like the rape apologists, whose only argument is:
When you say you won’t permit the threat of a purely imaginary scenario to change your moral assessment of rape? The apologist(s) calls you a moral monster for wanting to cause calamities with broad and deep impacts for the whole human species to save one particular human. They lash you with your willingness condemn imaginary crime until enough bystanders convince the apologist the argument is not working. What argument do they bring out then?
There are a ton of Atheist Experience clips where someone comes on and starts saying that atheists have the burden of proving there is no god, usually buttressing this burden-shift with an argument from ignorance. What happens when that fails? They refer to some new area of their ignorance previously unrevealed,
I accept micro, but…
is really just another rehash of the same:
:sigh:
We can be pretty clear on this.
One must not rape, not even if it saves all of mankind.
I prefer to be a hypothetical monster than a real one.
BTW I don’t think anyone who rejects rape unconditionally is a monster, not even hypothetically.