Unchallenged Darwinism Produces Sloppy Science
Any science needs open debate, but Darwinism is different: Big Science forbids it. Here are examples of ridiculous speculations that result.
An Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness (Rafi Letzter at Live Science). Your rationality is a mistake. Your ancient ancestor caught a virus, and woke up, transforming from zombie to person. This is not just Letzter’s joke of the day; he is seriously passing it on from two Big-Science papers in the prestigious journal Cell. If any creationist made a comparably ridiculous and self-refuting suggestion, he would be laughed to high heaven by the atheist hatemongers on Twitter. Where are they when one of their own tells a whopper like this? Don’t wait for Darwin-adoring Live Science to publish a contrary opinion.
Our Universe Isn’t As Special As We’d Like to Believe (Rafi Letzter at Live Science). Another article from Letzter specifically attacks Bible-believers and creationists, repeating old misrepresentations about the Galileo affair, and then even mocking Jewish beliefs. Don’t expect the targets of the mockery to get equal time. But it’s not only theists who have pointed out the fine-tuning paradox with its many astronomical improbabilities without which the universe could not support life (see, for instance, the recent book by Lewis & Barnes, Fortunate Universe). After attacking anyone thinking the earth is special, Letzter allows materialists to make statements that are not only “fundamentally speculative”, but just plain stupid: for instance,
Perhaps a universe pops into full existence only when its physical constants are just such that they might be observed?
It’s a strange and radical way of thinking about this vast space and our place in it. But it’s not a fringe idea.
Not a fringe idea? Sure; just like a cult ceases to be called a cult when a majority in power believe its teachings. Next, Letzter turns a page and lets physicists wallow in their imaginations to speculate about how a habitable universe might exist without the weak force. All along, predictably, everyone at the microphone assumes billions of years and life emerging from chemicals. No debate allowed. Cartoonist Johnny Hart (d. 2007) portrayed the irony of the situation:
Did humans domesticate themselves? (Phys.org). Some storytellers from Barcelona, pretending to be scientists, make up a myth that humans “domesticated themselves.” That’s not only stupid, but racist. If you read further, you find his story depends on the notion that “docility or a gracile physiognomy” led to pro-social instincts, just as (he claims) it did with dogs and chimpanzees. This implies that any human not modern-looking enough gets relegated to the less-evolved, less-fit stock. It’s the same racist tactic used by evolutionary racists of the 19th century to relegate ‘primitives’ to lower ranks than white Europeans which they assumed were more beautiful and intelligent. It gets a pass in Big Media because no Darwin skeptic is ever allowed to criticize whatever a Darwinist says.
Climate change, evolution, and what happens when researchers are also friends (Colorado State). As long as you swear to Darwin and wear your D-Merit Badge, you will have lots of friends. You can get together over a drink and think up the latest just-so stories. “What happens when six graduate students in different fields, who happen to be friends, put their heads together on an emerging issue in climate change?” this press release asks. “They get published in a major journal.” That’s because Big Science journals do not allow critical debate from non-Darwinians to interfere with Darwinian storytelling. That allowed these six dudes to play prophet, speculating about how evolution will change the carbon cycle. The word evolution permeates this short article. And since they found a way to merge natural selection with climate change (two politically-correct memes), the journals welcomed these six grad students with open arms.
Research identifies ‘evolutionary rescue’ areas for animals threatened by climate change (Phys.org). The University of Montana got into the same act, merging climate change with evolution. We might call this the case of the peppered rabbits. These evolutionists try to predict whether evolution will select for brown snowshoe hares and weasels where climate change doesn’t camouflage them fast enough with snow. Note to evolutionists: they’re still hares and weasels of the same species.
Origins of land plants pushed back in time (University of Bristol). Evolutionists are permitted to make wild changes to previous claims, as long as they stay within the Darwin camp. Here, we see evolutionists deciding to swing some deck chairs around, concluding that “the first plants to colonise the Earth originated around 500 million years ago – 100 million years earlier than previously thought.” (Previously thought by whom? see Tontology). How radical is that? It almost adds plants to the Cambrian Explosion of animals. Surely, they must have been forced to this position by empirical evidence, like fossils. No. Damn the fossils! Full speed ahead! –into the “molecular clock” hypothesis, a fully Darwin-saturated idea that depends entirely on how fast they think plants should have taken to evolve, even with no fossil support. The BBC News thought this was just great, reproducing all the artwork and talking points from Bristol:
Bristol: “For the first four billion years of Earth’s history, our planet’s continents would have been devoid of all life except microbes. All of this changed with the origin of land plants from their pond scum relatives, greening the continents and creating habitats that animals would later invade.”
BBC News: “Land plants evolved from ‘pond scum’ about 500 million years ago, according to new research.“
Bats spread Ebola because they’ve evolved not to fight viruses (New Scientist). Observation: some bats are vectors for dangerous viruses. That’s the science, but how did this situation come about? This article presents the fact-free and logic-challenged that animals can choose to evolve their own responses to viruses. “Evolution” in this article is just a tacked-on word that explains nothing. It’s Lamarckian, too, as if the bats acquired a modified response to viruses and then passed on the habit to their babies. How many bat ancestors were wiped out by disease before this trait caught on? Writer Michael Coghlan makes up a just-so story that bats lead strenuous lives, therefore they needed to co-exist with their viruses: “bats appear to have evolved milder reactions to viral infections, allowing the bats and the viruses to tolerate each other.” If that were a law of nature, why don’t other animals with strenuous lifestyles afflicted with viruses do that? Cheetahs, birds, whales and humans come to mind.
Male Proboscis Monkeys With Bigger Noses Have Better Sex Lives (National Geographic). It’s an observational fact that males of many species, including primates, spiders and birds, look different than females, a phenomenon known as sexual dimorphism. It’s also a fact that proboscis monkeys have large noses. The problem with this article is that it pretends to explain how the large nose on this species evolved, but doesn’t deliver. Subtitle: “A new study nearly two decades in the making sheds light on how the endangered—and distinctive—primate evolved.” Later on, though, the article only speculates:
Despite the immense effort, more mysteries remain. For one, how precisely did the unusual nose first evolve?
Alan Dixson, a biologist at Victoria University of Wellington who reviewed the paper, notes that the data don’t show definitively how the noses evolved. They may have arisen primarily as “badges of status” among males or as billboards for females.
How much light has evolutionary theory shed on this question of origins? If evolution were a law of nature, one might think every primate male would sport a big, dangly nose in front of females. The scientists are not only unsure of how the big proboscis evolved; they don’t even know whether the noses lead to sexual success. The noses might grow larger after the male already acquires a harem, the article suggests. In any case, sexual success, even if the big nose helps, says nothing about the origin of the feature in the first place.
The conflict between males and females could replace the evolution of new species (Science Daily). One genre of evolutionary just-so story is to claim that Darwin was a little bit wrong, and that his insights need expansion. In the UK, storytellers came up with this line that they say elaborates on standard Darwinian evolution: “The conflict between the sexes can lead to one sex becoming bigger, more colourful or adapting to eat different food, just like a traditional process of evolution by natural selection can lead an ancestor to split into two different species.” In their view, sexes can become “distinct enough to be equivalent to different species.” So what happens when they mate? Did they think about that?
Evolution May Make it Harder for Humans to Hold Their Liquor (Live Science). Laura Geggel vomited out a new hypothesis that humans are evolving to get sicker on alcohol. “Humans are still evolving… but before toasting to that, know this: Some of the genetic changes may make hangovers worse, a new study finds.” A new study. Studies can prove anything. So is this leading to the origin of species? Will we have Homo sapiens and Homo alcohol (hold more alcohol)? One wonders who at the University of Pennsylvania was participating in the controlled experiments for this whopper: the scientists or the reporters.
What do Evolutionists Really Know About Anything?
Two Darwin gurus (a professor and his postdoc) from Stanford reveal that their grand pronouncements about evolution stand on nothing solid. Science Daily quotes Nicole Creanza, who wants to make evolutionary teaching a multidisciplinary
“Within the blink of an eye on a geological timescale, humans advanced from using basic stone tools to examining the rocks on Mars; however, our exact evolutionary path and the relative importance of genetic and cultural evolution remain a mystery,” said Creanza, who specializes in the application of computational and theoretical approaches to human and cultural evolution, particularly language development. “Our cultural capacities-to create new ideas, to communicate and learn from one another, and to form vast social networks-together make us uniquely human, but the origins, the mechanisms, and the evolutionary impact of these capacities remain unknown.“
She claims that history left “few other traces” about mankind. Has she never heard of the Bible?
Oh, but that’s ruled out by the Chief Priests of the Darwin Cult.