Culture

Incomparably more influential than any science textbook, Wikipedia with its seen-as-if-through-a-funhouse-mirror rendering of intelligent design passes along with its distortions directly into the bloodstream of popular consciousness. If you’re ever looking for a way to kill time, counting errors per sentence in any Wikipedia article that touches on ID will soak up plenty. This of course is a way to really kill time — not to use it effectively by somehow correcting the errors. No class of people on the planet has more time on their hands than the guys who edit Wikipedia articles. As part of what seems to be a 24/7 unpaid job, they stand ready at a moment’s notice to change any attempted correction back to its original erroneous version.

Along with other falsehoods, the ranks of Wikipedia errors include a group of myths, comprising a Darwinian Mythos of superstitious, credulous, fallacious and legendary beliefs about intelligent design. Among these, the myth as to falsifiability or testability ranks high on the Wikipedia Scale. The latter is a rough measure of how important a particular mythic theme is to the overarching conception of Darwinism as unquestionable “fact,” gauged by how insistent the Wikipedia editors are in emphasizing it.

Regarding the mythic idea that intelligent design can’t be tested or falsified and is therefore unscientific, the Wikipedia editors quote the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. They cite the distinguished scientist and philosopher Judge John E. Jones. They cite blogger PZ Myers on “Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence.” They quote philosopher Elliott Sober: “Defenders of ID always have a way out. This is not the hallmark of a falsifiable theory.”

Yet isn’t it funny that the Darwinist faithful are often perfectly happy to launch attempts to clobber intelligent design on factual and scientific grounds — just as if ID were genuine science — only to retreat immediately behind the barricade of the Falsifiability Myth? If they had confidence either in the myth or in the attack, presumably they would choose one and stick with it.

Try to imagine being operated on without anesthesia. A kidney is removed and then, while you are still fully awake, the surgeon displays it to you for your consideration in his hand. Sounds like a very bad nightmare but this is the kind of thing Dr. Josef Mengele did routinely with patients at Auschwitz. What would inspire a human being to such devilry? What influence, perhaps early in life, might have nudged him off the course of what could have otherwise been a conventional medical career?

There are two big stories arising from the California Science Center’s censorship last October of the pro-intelligent design film Darwin’s Dilemma. The first big story, which was the primary focus of a Los Angeles Times article last week, is the act of censorship itself. As an agency of state government in California, the Science Center is required to abide by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. The Science Center didn’t have to rent its facilities to the public, but once it did so, as a government agency, it was legally obliged by the First Amendment to treat all citizens equally. But there is another big story tied to the Science Center that hasn’t received sufficient attention yet: The Center’s Read More ›

A reader of my blog, Paul Burnett taunts me:

Go ahead, David, say it: “Darwin taught Hitler (and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot) how to kill millions of people.”

That is of course a ridiculous parody of what I’ve written on Darwinism and its historical consequences, and I’ve never written a word about Darwin-Mao, but…now that you mention it, Paul, I just so happen to have before me on my desk China and Charles Darwin, by China scholar James Reeve Pusey of Bucknell University, published in 1983 by Harvard University Press. Pusey is a son of the illustrious late Harvard president Nathan Pusey. (They don’t give people names like that anymore, do they? Too bad.) Let’s just look up his conclusion, shall we? Hm, what’s this? He writes:

Mao Tse-tung finally claimed that Marxism-Leninism could all be boiled down to one sentence, tsao fan yu li — “To rebel is justified” — but that standard translation obscures the force of the li (reason or principle) that rebellion was now said to have. That Neo-Confucian word in [its] new context really meant that rebellion was a natural law, and that lesson had been taught to Mao Tse-tung not by Marx but by Sun Yat-sen and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, who had learned it, rightly or wrongly, from Darwin. For the li of revolution, they had said, lay in evolution.

Darwin justified revolution and thereby helped the cultural revolutions of Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, Hu Shih, and Mao Tse-tung (and, of course, so many others), and the political revolutions of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang K’ai-shek, and Mao Tse-tung. As things turned out, therefore, he seemd to help Mao Tse-tung the most, and indeed he did. He helped make the Marxists the fittest.

Darwin created the ideological vacuum [by undermining traditional ideas] that cried out for something like Marxism, and he established criteria for what that something should be. The new fit and fittening ideology had to be based on the Western science of evolutionary progress. It had to identify inevitable, natural stages of human social development. It had to promise historical inevitability and yet at the same time recognize the vital importance of human action. It had to be based on struggle and yet stress mutual aid among members of the ch’un. It had to provide a non-racial enemy to explain China’s inner and outer troubles without damning the Chinese — and it had to give the underdog a chance.

That last stipulation was not Darwin’s by any stretch of the imagination, but every Chinese Darwinist we have seen forced Darwin to give the underdog a chance….

More:

It’s the holiday season, which means that cheer and values like charity, academic freedom, tolerance, and diversity are abounding–but apparently not among Darwin’s defenders in the United Kingdom. A recent angry editorial by the “Atheist Examiner” titled “Creationists try to sneak Intelligent Design into school libraries” tells the story — except that it’s not the actual story. The correct story is that “Truth in Science,” a British organization allied with a number of credible British scientists and academics, is offering Explore Evolution to school libraries. Contra the “Atheist Examiner” article, the textbook Explore Evolution does not argue for intelligent design, but rather presents students with the scientific evidence both for and against neo-Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design is not advocated in Read More ›

The parallels between the CRU email scandal (aka “Climategate”) and the abuse of science perpetrated by those who want to keep Darwin-skeptics out of their universities, journals, and way, are clear to those closely involved in the debate over evolution. Today Stephen Meyer explains in an article at Human Events how familiar it is to have “scientists from various academic institutions hard at work suppressing dissent from other scientists who have doubts on global warming, massaging research data to fit preconceived ideas, and seeking to manipulate the gold standard ‘peer review’ process to keep skeptical views from being heard.” Does this sound familiar at all? To me, as a prominent skeptic of modern Darwinian theory, it sure does. For years, Read More ›

Confronted with problems in life, it’s useful to think in terms of trends. Whether I am a consumer strapped with paying off credit card debit or a Darwinian biologist strapped with trying to explain the origin and development of life, is a given problem’s power to bedevil me getting, on the whole, bigger or smaller? If smaller, then that’s a cause for relief. Evolutionists talk grandly, seeking to give the impression that their problem is increasingly in hand, or in the bag, or under control, whichever metaphor you prefer. But this is mostly bluff, as a report in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology reminds us.

If the evolutionary origin of DNA coding remains an enigma, try adding to that the origin of histone coding that’s associated with it. A group of researchers from Emory University School of Medicine have revealed ways that histones receive modifications in such a way as to convey information that in turn allows the information in DNA to be properly read.

When things like cells and the proteins that make them go were understood to be simple blob- or crystal-like entities, then explaining how their structure could be accounted for in terms of natural selection seemed a task that was not far out of reach. On the contrary, it appeared to be intuitively easy to imagine how a full and satisfying account could be detailed.

Histones are proteins that form the nucleosome spools on which DNA is coiled tightly to fit the stuff into the minute confines of the cell. Steve Meyer observes in Signature in the Cell, “[I]t is the specific shape of the histone proteins that enables them to do their job….Thanks in part to nucleosome spooling, the information storage density of DNA is many times that of our most advanced silicon chips.”