I'd hazard a guess that you're not going to like this post. I can assure you ahead of reading it, if you read it at all, that it is not a Christian diatribe. Also, it's becoming apparent that this blog is not going to have too many friends left if it continues attacking sacred cows this way but as that was the purpose, the prime objective, in the first place, it must continue to attack what seems plainly wrong.Following the Kennedy assassination, it was worrying the way analysis and research descended so swiftly into two camps – the single bullet theory proponents and the collusion theorists.
The tide of public opinion initially accepted Warren but, in 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that the original FBI investigation and the Warren Commission Report were seriously flawed. Most people in the U.S. appear to accept this latter position now - a 2003 ABC News poll found that 70% of respondents suspected there was an assassination plot.
The accepted orthodoxy at any time is always likely to alter.
On the whole gamut of evolutionary theory, from natural selection to radiocarbon dating,
Vox Day comments:
No doubt in twenty years, evolutionarians will be arguing that no scientist ever really believed that birds descended directly from dinosaurs and that you just don't understand science if you think anyone ever did... despite the fact that half the biology textbooks in America will still say that they did.
In referring to John Ruben, an OSU professor of zoology who wrote
an article: 'Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-bird Links', one commenter, Not a Lemur, observed:
Follow the money...
"Frankly, there's a lot of museum politics involved in this, a lot of careers committed to a particular point of view even if new scientific evidence raises questions," Ruben said. In some museum displays, he said, the birds-descended-from-dinosaurs evolutionary theory has been portrayed as a largely accepted fact, with an asterisk pointing out in small type that "some scientists disagree."
There’s an awful lot of politicking, name-calling and desperate attempts to slur the credibility of the opposing point of view in an attempt for the prevailing mindset to be accepted by all.
William R. Corliss, in Science Frontiers #10, Spring 1980, supported the notion that on the subject of anomalous radiometric dates, '
over 300 serious discrepancies are tabulated and backed by some 445 references from the scientific literature.'
Wiki has Arthur C. Clarke
commenting on Corliss:
Unlike Fort, Corliss selects his material almost exclusively from scientific journals like Nature and Science, not newspapers, so it has already been subjected to a filtering process which would have removed most hoaxes and reports from obvious cranks. Nevertheless, there is much that is quite baffling in some of these reports from highly reputable sources.
Evolutionist detractors, however, pointed to him quoting Woodmorappe, John; "Radiometric Geochronology Reappraised," Woodmorappe being a Creationist and therefore, by Evolutionist definition, wrong, rendering Corliss himself consequently wrong and the big tent of evolution, especially the aspect of radiometric dating, safe once again.
Even in the comments on the Vox Day article, we have
Sven, an evolutionist, stating:
That uranium decays at the same rate now as it did hundreds of millions of years ago is not an "assumption" in the sense of a belief that is no more plausible than not. It is ridiculously more plausible than not. For one thing, we see that similar events cause similar events all throughout time. For instance, it is very likely that rocks were falling toward 4 billion years ago. We call that gravity.
The existence of gravity is used as an analogy for the theory of evolution, based partly on uranium decay. Come again? And don't forget, Sven, that that is one of the arguments for Christianity -
It is ridiculously more plausible than not.Moving on, a character calling himself DH, 'Physics Expert', at Science Forums, gave three reasons to explain the c-14 anomaly, concluding:
Nearby radioactive material could trigger exactly the same C14 production process from nitrogen as occurs in the upper atmosphere, albeit at a much reduced rate. Another possible avenue is C13, which has a small but non-zero neutron absorption cross section. By either mechanism, this is essentially internal contamination. All this means is that measured dates older than some oldest reliable date are just that -- too old to date reliably.
So, having speculated, [by no means an invalid position to take in itself], as well as having conceded the anomaly of RCD and the impossibility of dating accurately, [a fair position for him to take], DH then makes a logical leap that dating has actually been ‘proved’ and states:
What is more alarming is that the Google searches for "carbon 14 RATE", "carbon 14 diamond", and "carbon 14 coal" yield hits predominantly in woowoo fundamentalist sites, and no hits on the first 15 pages (10 links per page) to anything at talkorigins.org or pandasthumb.org, period.
This, to him, is proof. He then quotes articles like
the following to support his position. Dr. Robert Holloway, whose heading to his article reveals his agenda immediately, quotes someone called Major [a creationist]:
"Modern radiocarbon dating assumes that the carbon-14/carbon-12 ratio in living organisms is the same now as it was in ancient organisms before they died. In other words, the system of carbon-14 production and decay is said to be in a state of balance or equilibrium."
Holloway replies:
The above statement is not accurate and is highly misleading. When the method was first developed in the late 1940s and for a few years afterward, the method did make the assumption mentioned. As a rough approximation, the assumption is valid. However, as an increasing number of carbon-14 dates were obtained, including many on objects of known age, it became clear that the assumption was not strictly true. This fact has been known to the scientific community for several decades and correction factors have been developed to adjust for the fact that the production rate of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has not been completely constant over the past few thousand years.
In other words, science recognizes anomalies in the process, which is not the conclusion he was trying to get across to his readers in his caustic article. Wiki, in its
stock article on radioactive dating, has less trouble with the anomalies, stating:
A raw BP date cannot be used directly as a calendar date, because the level of atmospheric 14C has not been strictly constant during the span of time that can be radiocarbon dated. The level is affected by variations in the cosmic ray intensity which is in turn affected by variations in the earth's magnetosphere. In addition, there are substantial reservoirs of carbon in organic matter, the ocean, ocean sediments (see methane hydrate), and sedimentary rocks. Changes in the Earth's climate can affect the carbon flows between these reservoirs and the atmosphere, leading to changes in the atmosphere's 14C fraction.
Aside from these changes due to natural processes, the level has also been affected by human activities. From the beginning of the industrial revolution in the 18th century to the 1950s, the fractional level of 14C decreased because of the admixture of large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, due to the excavated oil reserves and combustion production of fossil fuel. This decline is known as the Suess effect, and also affects the 13C isotope. However, atmospheric 14C was almost doubled for a short period during the 1950s and 1960s due to atmospheric atomic bomb tests.
As a consequence, the radiocarbon method shows limitations on dating of materials that are younger than the industrial era. Due to these fluctuations, greater carbon-14 content cannot be taken mean a lesser age. It is expected that in the future the radiocarbon method will become less effective. A calibration curve must sometimes be combined with contextual analysis, because there is not always a direct relationship between age and carbon-14 content.
Wiki has this:
Stephen Jay Gould received many accolades for his scholarly work and popular expositions of natural history, but was not immune from criticism by those in the biological community who felt his public presentations were, for various reasons, out of step with mainstream evolutionary theory. The public debates between Gould's proponents and detractors have been so quarrelsome that they have been dubbed "The Darwin Wars" by several commentators.
The fact biting everyone on the butt throughout this whole 'debate' is that no one really knows, there are most certainly anomalies, science itself goes through an evolutionary process of understanding, rendering something written in a journal twenty years ago no longer valid and in fact, the essential characteristic of science is an '
ongoing crisis of validity'. Science asks questions; it is not G-d and should not attempt to do a Dawkin and explain all away in one catch-all theory. It simply can't.
An example of this process of change in scientific thought is Fred Hoyle.
Wiki says:
In his later years, Hoyle became a staunch critic of theories of chemical evolution used to explain the naturalistic origin of life. With Chandra Wickramasinghe, Hoyle promoted the theory that life evolved in space, spreading through the universe via panspermia, and that evolution on earth is driven by a steady influx of viruses arriving via comets. In 1982, Hoyle presented Evolution from Space for the Royal Institution's Omni Lecture. After considering the very remote probability of evolution he concluded:
“If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of … ''
Hoyle may have been right, Hoyle may have been wrong and going senile. However, the view of the prevailing Orthodoxy that the Holy Tenets of Evolution are immutable is just bunkum.
For example, the Neoproterozoic interval, the gap of unknown duration between the time when animals first supposedly evolved and the oldest known fossil or geochemical evidence of animals (latest Neoproterozoic, about 600-650 million years ago) has not been satisfactorily addressed although
Neuweiler and others attempted to.
The anomalies go
on and on:
Niles Eldredge said that in 1972 he discovered some features in the fossil record that just did not fit the idea of slow and gradual evolution. He enlisted the assistance of Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard and introduced the world to the theory they called punctuated equilibria. Gould said, in 1981:
In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record -- geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis) -- reflect the predictions of (this new) evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record.
He contended that the lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record could not continue to be explained away with stories about the unlikelihood of anything but the terminal forms with completed organs being fossilized. This absence of intermediates he called a trend:"Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within lineages, but must arise from the differential success of certain kinds of species." It was more like climbing stairs than rolling up an incline.''
At a convention of science writers November 19, 1978, in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Dr. Eldredge was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying that if life had evolved into the wondrous profusion of creatures little by little, then there should be some fossiliferous record of those changes. The report said:
But no one has found any such in-between creatures.Recapitulation. On this, anthropologist professor Ashley Montagu, in a debate with Dr. Duane Gish on April 12, 1980, at Princeton University, verified Dr. Raup's claim that the "law" had been debunked in the 1920s. First Dr. Gish commented on the harmful effects of evolution theory on research:
Years and years of embryological research was essentially wasted because people, convinced of the theory of evolution and that embryos recapitulated their evolutionary ancestry, spent much of their time in embryological research trying to develop phylog-enies based on the data of embryology. As I mentioned earlier, embryologists have abandoned the theory of embryological recapitulation. They don't believe it. They know it is not true.... It produced bad research rather than the good research that should have been done.
Dr. Montagu added:
The theory of recapitulation was destroyed in 1921 by Professor Walter Garstand in a famous paper, since when no respectable biologist has ever used the theory of recapitulation, because it was utterly unsound, created by a Nazi-like preacher named Haeckel.
Dr. Gish went on:
Ladies and gentlemen, I have traveled all over the world. I have debated and lectured on many, many major university campuses, and it is hardly a single university campus that I appear on that some student does not tell me that he is taught the theory of embryological recapitulation right there at that university. I've had many evolutionists argue the evidence for evolution from embryological recapitulation. Unfortunately, as Dr. Montagu has said, it is a thoroughly discredited theory, but it is still taught in most biology books and in most universities and schools as evidence for evolution.
Montague concluded:
Well ladies and gentlemen, that only goes to show that many so-called educational institutions, called universities, are not educational institutions at all or universities; they are institutes for mis-education.
The thrust of this post is not the debunking of evolution [that might be a side-effect] but:
1. the point made by Dr. Montague, that there is so much mis-education going on in places of higher learning;
2. there are active attempts at suppression of alternate evidence, using ad hominem [an example appears a few paragraphs down];
3. that youth, through the educative process, is being deliberately fed a one-sided debate as if it were gospel, a side which naturally appeals to its easily activated critical faculties and, by means of colourful language and techniques of propaganda [the example below], youth has no way of developing any view except that of mainstream evolution. This particularly afflicts bloggers in the 20-45 age range who grew up with the revised texts and teachers, totally convinced of the invulnerability and immutability of evolution, which is patently false;
4. the misrepresentation of the scientific method, as stated above and its transformation from ‘hypothesis and empirical investigation, leading to a progressively increasing body of evidence’ to the status of Unassailable Lore.
There is most certainly a concerted effort to snuff out legitimate socio-political debate in a highly coloured manner by the Evolutionary Dogmatists, not least because the ID people seem so weird in the way they're going about it. This article below by Josh Rosenau, in Seed Magazine, June 13th, 2009, is a case in point, where
he states:
The National Center for Science Education, in Oakland, CA, where I work, has tracked hundreds of attacks on evolution education in 48 states in the last five years. In the last two years alone, 18 bills in 10 states have targeted the teaching of evolution. These bills, like the flawed science standards approved by the Texas Board of Education in March, don’t ban evolution outright. But they do authorize teachers to omit evolution or include creationism at their whim.
In other words, to allow free debate. He sees debate as ‘attacks’.
By expanding the attacks beyond evolution to include scientific expertise itself, these conservatives weaken understanding both of the scientific process and how the scientific community evaluates ideas. And because of the state’s enormous purchasing power for textbooks, Texas’s standards will ultimately affect textbooks nationwide.
Ah, there we have the real bee in the bonnet – the fear of the re-balancing of the textbooks, skewed by a generation of biased education. Doubts that evolutionists see themselves to be engaged in a war are weakened in Rosenau’s next comment:
Given these stakes, my colleagues and I worked hard to influence the Texas School Board over the months of hearings … We worked with local activists to organize constituents and political honchos who educated board members about the importance of evolution to science education.
Educated? As in Stalin ‘educated’ ? As in Mao ‘educated?’ Typical of the type of logic employed by such people as Rosenau is:
They [the hated Creationists] were aided by testimony from Ray Bohlin, a molecular biologist who left science to start a fundamentalist ministry.
Er … how does one ‘leave’ science? Does that mean that a recognized scientist’s working background is now set at nought, along with his storehouse of evidence because that scientist ‘did a Hoyle’ and saw elements in the debate other than the Official Evolutionary Dogmatic Line? Rosenau continues in similar vain, mentioning:
Pro-evolution clergy are being organized through the Clergy Letter Project to dispel religious doubts about evolution.
The use of the word ‘religious’, trotted out by evolutionists to be synonomous with ‘false, misleading’, defines the debate in such a way that the only opponents of the Official Evolutionary Dogmatic Line are religious, therefore Christian, therefore Creationist, therefore Woowoo. I like his ‘are being organized’ . Rational argument not good enough?
How would Rosenau deal with
this review of Søren Løvtrup, Darwinism: the Refutation of a Myth, Croom Helm, London, New York and Sydney, 1987?
Speaking of Darwin's theory of natural selection, Løvtrup asks: "Hence, to all intents and purposes the theory has been falsified, so why has it not been abandoned?" (p. 352). The answer given is that its adherents refuse to accept falsifying evidence. The evidence presented in this book, and the general situation in evolutionary writings, make one wonder whether these statements could as well be applied to the belief in evolution in general.’’
Er … is Løvtrup a Woowoo Creationist or
a respected scientist?
Not all anomalies are fatal to evolution but this blind belief in the immutability of what is, after all, just a theory can be seen in
Gavin de Beer. For example, in a 1971 monograph: Homology, An Unsolved Problem de Beer, pp. 15-16, de Beer concluded that:
"homologous structures need not be controlled by identical genes," and that "the inheritance of homologous structures from a common ancestor ... cannot be ascribed to identity of genes. Consider genus rosa family rosaceae. Some roses have two sets of seven, or 14 chromosomes, while others have 21 (three sets of 7) or 28 (four sets of seven) chromosomes, respectively.
Or this by Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Nat.History, in Harpers, Feb. 1984, p.56:
"You say I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type or organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line-there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another. ... But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. ... I don't think we shall ever have any access to any form of tree which we can call factual."
Or W.E. Swinton, Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, Vol 1, p1:
"The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved."
And so it goes on. Evolution creaks like an old gate, it's a cracked bell, to mix metaphors, it's stumbling about in a dark room but as Leonard Cohen sang, about
cracks in a dark room:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
Creationists shoot themselves in the foot [feet?]There’s little doubt that the debate is complex enough without falsely qualified or unqualified spokespeople on either side coming into it. An example is
here and also on
this page which exposes the unqualified.
I personally feel that such Creationists are far from clever. Attempting to take on the Official Evolutionary Dogma without a professional grounding in the subject is hazardous at best. To do it, knowing you’ll be under attack, without a ‘squeaky clean, accredited qualification’ is madness in terms of the way the debate has been allowed to have been framed by the opposition.
Simply put, this framing has meant that one can’t gain a qualification in an accredited university with a sceptical mindset – refer to Rosenau again above. It is not a level playing field.
A personal anecdote, in the field of education, revolves around an assignment we were given as students, on Erich Fromm and the Frankfurt School. I took the point of view that the Frankfurt School was essentially an attempt to rationalize the fundamental unsustainability of socialism, an attempt to weave critical reaction to its failure into a new theory which eventually merged with the New Left’s subconsciously nihilistic mindset.
Attack this at your leisure but the point was that I had attacked the Holy Cows.
At that time, as a Labour supporter, my stance was only a reaction against the orthodoxy of Leftist political thought within the university’s political department. If I’d had Christianity forced down my throat at university, I’d doubtless have produced a paper on the flaws in Christianity.
Needless to say, my paper was not only rejected but I was castigated by the lecturer who then stormed into the staff room [so one of the tutors informed me later], mouthing near-obscenities at my gall in attacking the Frankfurt School, from a position of misunderstanding.
Apparently the others in the room sipped on their tea and nodded that Higham was getting above himself.
I still hold that line that the Frankfurt School was a bunch of socialists, baffled by why their theories went pear-shaped in the cold, hard light of day, who’d seen the revolution go wrong and wanted to get it back on track.
Cynically, I wrote the next paper completely in line with establishment thinking. i.e. Marxist but with sufficient analysis of the anti-Frankfurt line as fundamentally flawed and I passed with flying colours.
So much for objectivity.
The Creationist’s attempt to set up their own universities is, in part, an attempt to counter the bias of the Official Leftist Orthodoxy in the political thinking of tertiary institutions. They’re trying to counter socialist feminists like Faust who have now, with her cronies,
hijacked Harvard.
The Creationist ploy can’t work, as those who’ve hijacked the university mindset can testify - the students are already too indoctrinated. One need only ask, ‘Qualifications?’ of a Creationist and it’s often game, set and match. The fact that you can be well read on a subject, not in your own professional field, perhaps even having a lifetime of study in that area, cuts no ice with people determined to snuff out debate.
Ask the question of yourself: ‘What possible qualification have you, not being a professional politician, to run a blog which makes any form of political comment?’
None at all according to the evolutionists. As Sarkozy said in
the Farage youtube [at 2:19] – that’s a matter best left to the parliamentarians. Thus - evolution is a matter best left to the Evolutionist Disciples. Don't meddle where you're not wanted and leave the Evolutionary Bible chained to the pulpit, please. Anyway, it's in Latin.
Science is surely the art of asking questions about the world and testing out hypotheses, realizing that someone down the track is going to revise any currently held consensus.
It is not and should never be, as has happened with the irrationalist, pseudo-scientific, anti-metaphysical, socialist left who control all modes of political thought in intellectual ‘debate’ these days, a method of creating a new God who actively attempts to snuff out divergent and opposed opinion.
Longrider talks telephone:
