If its bigfoot, where to now, creationists?, page 2

Originally posted by dave420
reply to post by XIDIXIDIX

Just read the wikipedia page on evolution. Seriously. It seems that might confuse the living heck out of you.

I don't give a rat's ass about your cars or your education, as I'm not inclined to believe you have either.

Well thats ok Dave, then I won't be inclined to make you sick by proving it.

Perhaps that is why you don't amount to a Rats ass when you don't give a rats ass. you get what ya give david, ya get what ya give.

Speaking of rats asses, did you know they found a 55 million year old fossil of a rat and its ass hasn't changed or evolved an iota ? Nothing like the asses I see evolving among the Darwinists here

Your wiki page seems a tad out of synch with Darwins TRUE history. It seems this was as if Darwin wrote it and that would explain all the hub bub about a guy who when you really take a good solid look at his accomplishments, he was a bit of a cad

Darwin is but one of many distinguished scientists and he is not associated with any public benefit, unlike his contemporary Louis Pasteur, who is associated with the germ theory of disease. Although the mass media commonly identify evolution with Darwin, this is typical of popular garbles of complicated facts. Pasteur didn't invent the germ theory of disease (let alone vaccination), and Darwin didn't invent the evolution idea. Those attributions flow from the hosannas of personality cults that formed in their lifetimes. Pasteur received France's highest honour, the Grand Croix of the Legion of Honour, and the Pasteur Institute was established under his direction. He was buried in the Notre Dame Cathedral with great ceremony and an air of superiority to the British.

Another curiosity is that the primary bicentennial testimony, the lavish Darwin Exhibition, was created not in Cambridge but at New York's American Museum of Natural History. It opened in November 2005, and migrates to other museums until it comes to rest in London's Natural History Museum in February 2009. My initial contact with the Exhibition was its website, whose home page conveys the tale in a short message: Discover the man and the revolutionary theory that changed the course of science and society, and, For 21 years he kept his theory secret. A highlighted tag reads Featuring live Galapagos tortoises, iguana, and frogs! In the background are images of the HMS Beagle and the Galapagos Archipelago. Prominently to the left is the familiar photo portrait of the aged Darwin in his prophet-like mood: remote, yet near; intense, yet detached; suffering, yet serene.

As a historian preparing a book on nineteenth-century evolution, I keenly toured the online Exhibition; six months later I walked the real thing in New York and confirmed my expectation that the online version is an accurate representation. The Exhibition's story is also consistent with the 1959 centenary of the publication of The Origin of Species, hosted by the University of Chicago, and with the 1909 celebration of the golden anniversary of the Origin's publication. All tout Darwin as an epic hero, ascribing imaginary achievements and glossing over the all-too-human flaws. But there are some differences.

Evolution theory in 1909 was in turmoil because cell-based experimental biology had recently discovered an explanation of inheritance inconsistent with Darwin's speculative inheritance theory. Contributors to the commemorative conference represented this intense conflict and they reached no consensus. Yet in the introductory essay of the book Fifty Years of Darwin, zoologist Edward B. Poulton ignored the conflict to celebrate Darwin's remarkable command of the fine detail of plants and animals. The Darwin Exhibition duplicates Poulton's evasion—there's no mention of the "eclipse of Darwinism" phase of evolution's history. Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics and the only nineteenth-century scientist to discover quantitative biological laws, gets no mention. The public are encouraged to believe that contemporary evolutionary theory is just Darwin's theory extended over an ever-widening domain. In reality it required a major reconstruction, called "Neo-Darwinism", that reconciled the Darwin–Mendel conflict with a new tool devised in the 1920s, population genetics.

DARWIN'S FIVE-YEAR VOYAGE in HMS Beagle is a classic story of the young hero's initiation into knowledge that he will convert into world-changing vision: the evolution of living things by natural selection. The story goes like this. Young Darwin was recommended by his Cambridge mentor as the Beagle's naturalist. He threw himself into the task, wrote copious notes, and collected many specimens. On the Galapagos Archipelago, he observed that the fauna of similar species varied from island to island. Might the differences be due heritable changes induced by "transmutation"? On his return home, a taxonomist confirmed that the differences were indeed species differences. The latent evolution idea distilled into the revolutionary idea on reading Thomas Malthus' celebrated statement affirming the natural necessity of the struggle for existence in which the weak and vulnerable perish. The great principle sprang to life, and Darwin commenced his long, secret meditation whose fruit was The Origin of Species.

A story more faithful to fact goes like this. Darwin was exposed to transmutationism at age eighteen, when he encountered the transmutationist Robert Grant at Edinburgh University. They got on well, probably in part due to Grant's delight in having the grandson of the nation's best-known transmutationist, Erasmus Darwin, under his tutelage. His exposure was increased by the library that he took aboard the Beagle. Charles Lyell's freshly-published Principles of Geology contained an extensive summary of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's theory. His library also included the seventeen-volume transmutationist Dictionnaire Classique d'Historie Naturelle, which, as it happens, used data from island biogeography to argue for adaptive radiation. Whether Darwin's attention to the biogeography of the Galapagos was informed by the Dictionnaire we don't know, but the priority attributed to Darwin is incorrect.

And natural selection? As Darwin tells the story, he didn't derive it as an induction from the Galapagos or other evidence; it came to him as an intuition, or better, a vision of living nature. He needed another two decades to assemble evidence. As he was writing his classic, he learned, to his dismay, that the young naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had hit upon what he judged to be exactly his own prized concept. Uncertain what to do, he passed the challenge to friends, who resolved credit for priority of discovery in his favour.

But another challenge emerged only months after the Origin's publication. A Scottish arboriculturist, Patrick Matthew, wrote an article pointing out that he had himself published a statement of the "natural law of selection" in 1831, the year of the Beagle's departure. Darwin graciously acknowledged Matthew's priority and included recognition of it in the third edition of the Origin. The Exhibition makes no mention of this key historical fact. Darwin made natural selection his "child" (as he called it), not by discovering it, but by assembling the evidence for and against with a thoroughness that no one else remotely approached.

Another detail tarnishes the legend. The claim that Darwin was named the Beagle's naturalist suggests early confidence in his scientific destiny. The reality is that the Beagle's naturalist was a physician, Robert McCormick. Darwin was selected by Captain Robert Fitzroy as his gentleman companion. The Admiralty listed him as a "supernumerary"; he had no duties and he paid all his costs, including specimen collection. However, McCormick abandoned the Beagle after a year, while the supernumerary quickly matured to a talented naturalist. When Darwin as editor of the numerous studies of the Beagle's specimens claimed to be the Beagle's naturalist, only a lawyer might quibble. Captain Fitzroy did not.

One of the core beliefs of the legend is that the Origin suddenly illuminated the living world that until then had been cast in theological shadows. "The Origin of Species caused a sensation," the Exhibition claims, "not only in Britain but around the world … the book sold out of stores the first day … and in a surprisingly short time, the storm passed—at least for scientists. Evolution by natural selection became part of their language, integral to scientific work." Natural selection, we are told, is the "foundation for all modern biology" and Darwin "launched modern biological science … evolution by natural selection became part of [biologists'] language, integral to scientific work".

Not one of these statements is true. The book that caused a sensation was the anonymously authored Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which appeared in 1844. It was a full-scale philosophy insisting on explanation by natural causes alone. It commenced with the origin of the solar system, passed on to the abiotic origin of life, then to the evolution of plants and animals, culminating in the evolution of the human species. It provoked furious denunciations from leading scientists and clergymen, among them the geologist Adam Sedgwick, who predicted "ruin and confusion in such a creed", which, if adopted by the lower classes "will undermine the whole moral and social fabric". Yet Vestiges sold well—26,000 copies by 1860.

Sedgwick's distress about its corrupting influence was warranted by its popularity not only among workers, but among all classes and even the Queen. It was translated into Dutch and German, and sold briskly in America, where one admirer was Abraham Lincoln. Another admirer was the showman P.T. Barnum, who dazzled his customers by exhibiting the "missing link" between humans and apes, "Zip the Pinhead" (who in reality was an Afro-American, William Henry Johnson). By the time the Origin appeared, the evolution idea had reached saturation point in England. That is why Darwin's publisher printed only 1250 copies of the first edition, which did not sell out on the first day in the shops, as the legend boasts. It never became a best-seller in Darwin's lifetime.

Did scientists believe that Darwin had proved his grand thesis of evolution by natural selection? Many eminent living evolutionists who should know better say so unreservedly. Actually the book's real achievement was to re-establish evolution as a serious scientific question and to stimulate a wide-ranging debate about evidence and hard questions. The debate developed into a "crisis" of Darwin's theory about 1900 when cellular biology matured to include the inheritance mechanisms, chromosomes and genes. In the intervening years, even the most ardent Darwinians made significant departures from his theory. Thomas Huxley and Francis Galton rejected natural selection. George Romanes claimed that Darwin didn't explain speciation; he devised a new mechanism, "physiological selection", to explain it. Alfred Wallace was an ardent proponent of natural selection, except as applied to ourselves. He maintained that our primate origin could not explain the human mind. He had recourse to spiritualism, then in fashion.

Gregor Mendel believed that his discovery disproved natural selection by proving the static character of inheritance. No one read Mendel, but the most widely read evolutionists, Ernst Haeckel and Herbert Spencer, agreed with him without knowing it. According to them, natural selection accounted only for the elimination of the unfit; Lamarckism, by contrast, was the engine of novelty.

What about "modern biology"? Was it launched by Darwin's discoveries? On the contrary, it flourished decades before the appearance of the Origin. Evolution didn't figure in those investigations because nerves, cells and infectious pathogens operate in the here and now and on the micro scale. Conversely, Darwin was unacquainted with this literature, whose terminology and experimental method were well ahead of the naturalist's home-grown experiments and speculation. This is abundantly clear by comparing Darwin's Pangenesis theory of reproduction with the experimental evidence for cell division that culminated in the elucidation of meiosis and mitosis. One of the principal contributors to this development, Oscar Hertwig, published a detailed analysis and refutation of Darwin's theory. In sum, the Exhibition's statement that the Origin was the "foundation" of modern biology is incompatible with any knowledge of it.

The Exhibition's mega-claim is that Darwin's "revolutionary theory" changed "society". This promise of a gripping story unfortunately falls a little flat. There are hints that the launch of secularism and humanist agitation for religious freedom might be intended. Many Darwinians in those days, as today, were aggressive critics of religion and staunch humanists. Yet the Exhibition touts the compatibility of evolution with religion, limiting itself to polite scorn of Intelligent Design and Creationism.

What about Social Darwinism and economic competition? We're told that this concept is a "misuse of a purely scientific theory for a completely unscientific purpose". Today, yes, but the New York Times Darwin obituary declared that "the central principle—his opponents call it a dogma—of Mr. Darwin's system is 'natural selection,' called by Herbert Spencer 'the survival of the fittest,' a choice which results inevitably from 'the struggle for existence.'" The obituary continues with an outline of Social Darwinism. Its practical application was eugenics, which meant optimising the number of the best human types.

The Exhibition is silent about eugenics. This is a damning evasion. The fusion of Social Darwinism with eugenics was the most novel idea of social change to emerge from the Darwinian revolution. That three of Darwin's sons, two of them leading scientists, warmly supported eugenics indicates its respectability. But more to the point, the Museum's long-serving Director, Henry Fairfield Osborn, hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress at the Museum in 1921: the Exhibition ducks its own past. It also avoids coming to grips with the historical conflict with religion. Its roots sprang from the Enlightenment and exploded in the French Revolution. The strong wind of nineteenth-century secularisation blew from many quarters, including Darwinians, feminists, humanists, trade unions and liberals. But the strongest wind was socialism, since the Soviets instituted the world's first official state atheism. Darwin's Britain, by contrast, has yet to disestablish the Church of England. This compromising fact is ignored by British atheists today.

WHAT REVISIONS of the standard image of Darwin and Darwinism are warranted by a factual look backward? That the Exhibition is an American creation reflects the fact that the evolution–religion entanglement is largely an American phenomenon of the post-1960s. Moral Majority types are reacting to wholesale secularisation from many sides, most of which have no science component. Madonna's erotic parodies of the Virgin Mary that enchant millions of youth have far greater impact than humanist blogs or protests at Ken Ham's Creation Museum. Best-sellers by evolution atheists are small change compared with the massive sweep of The Da Vinci Code—25 million copies in two years! Children respond positively to museum visits, but that's no comparison with their captivation by the magic of Hogwarts. J.K. Rowling's books have sold over 300 million copies, not only in the West but around the world, including "communist" China. Add the films, and the impact doubles.

It's not to be expected that creationists and evolutionists will abandon their outdated antagonism; it's too much fun. But the bicentennial is an apposite moment to recognise that the antagonism expresses a historical moment of secularism that continues today on a much-reduced scale of importance. Exposing the nonsense of the Creation Museum has less relevance than coming to terms with Hogwarts magic: Darwin can't compete with Harry Potter. This is not to suggest that we discard Darwin as a hero of science and secularisation. Far from it. But since our commitment to rationality obliges us to get it right, let's replace the legendary Darwin by the real man and his times.

The single most compelling sentence in the whole article is this:

"It's not to be expected that creationists and evolutionists will abandon their outdated antagonism; it's too much fun.

Ain't that the truth

[edit on 16-8-2008 by XIDIXIDIX]

[edit on 16-8-2008 by XIDIXIDIX]