The evolution debate has turned into a social calamity and the blame can’t be laid simply on religious resistance. The scientific establishment has always shot itself in the foot by promoting a deceptive and pseudo-scientific brand of slectionist Darwinism. Note the careful phrasing. The issue is not evolution but the statistically bogus theory of natural selection as random evolution. But this distinction is obscured both by religionists (often but not always creationists) and scientists who often accuse critics of rejecting evolution which is taken as synonymous with selections Darwinism, but the two are not the same. Creationist contribute to this confusion because it is convenient to use the flaws of selections Darwinism to reject evolution in general. Continue reading “Confusions of natural selection…//Religion is not the factor that most influences rejection of evolutionary theory in schools, study says”
Tag: natural selection
The fallacy of natural selection
The idea from evolutionary psychology that we evolved by natural selection and that we are adapted to the world of the Paleolithic is a fallacy. We may certainly have some archaic characteristics but modern man is as much adapted to the Neolithic and to civilization as anything else. The fallacy of natural selection has totally confused the issue: man adapts very quickly to new situations. That said, no one has really arrived at a scientific understanding of evolution beyond the idiocy of Darwinism so we can’t be quite sure just who/what ‘man’ is…
This is why Jackson has for nearly four decades been suggesting that the key to designing more sustainable systems is to recognize that we are “a species out of context.” Evolution by natural selection adapted us to a gathering-and-hunting lifestyle in small band-level societies. Prior to the invention of agriculture, humans were mostly foragers living in a social group of probably no more than 100 people, and often far fewer. Not only did our bodies evolve for that way of living, but so did our brains (our brains are part of our bodies, of course, but it’s important to emphasize this because so many people think of the human mind as somehow being distinct from the body).
Source: Opinion | The Politics of Overconsumption and Getting the Scale Right | Wes Jackson
Red Dynamite by Carl R. Weinberg | Paperback
Do Darwin Critics Reject Evolution Because They’re Anti-Communists? Carl Weinberg Says Yes
I was alerted to this book by the post at Evo-News, the ID site, and there is also a review:
I haven’t yet read this book but it has a free Kindle so I will go through it and comment again. But I can see already the hopeless confusion of Darwinists on the subject of evolution and the way the ID camp, if not the creationists can sink such books on the spot. My reaction is, What a waste? The issue is very simple: natural selection is statistically impossible as a source of evolutionary constructs. Darwinists, no matter how many times the problem is pointed to, are incapable of grasping the statistical error at the foundation of the whole Darwinian phantom ‘science’. The ID-ists win every argument here despite their own confusions over theism and design. A pyrrhic victory, therefore. If natural selection fails then the obvious problem arises with design, where does it come from. Here the creationists/ID-its fall into their own confusion by trying to graft a scientific argument onto a Biblical argument completely obscuring the whole design question. In any case, the design of biological entities show a mysterious design. And that can be problematic, but only because science can’t yet solve the problem which founders in some of the classic antinomial issues of Kant: you cannot prove the existence of god using a design argument, and the ‘design inference’ of Dembski however suggestive simply fails as proof however tantalizing as evidence, which induces design hallucinations.
Update: I forgot to address the issue of communism raised. But communism/socialism was in existence before Darwin and it was the blunder of Marx to graft that onto his work, to its great detriment. Lamarck was a radical leftist for his time (French Revolution) and his basic intuition about evolution was superior to the klutz thinking of Darwin.
Still, the design inference is a suggestive formulation of a tricky subject. If you can’t use the design argument to prove the existence of god, you can’t disprove it either, save only that the theistic tack is always such gibberish if bad theology that the anti-designist wins by default. That’s the catch: a design argument must be constructivist but that always fails. The history of monotheism shows the reign of delusive design arguments.
Note however that the ancient Israelites, in their now lot core vision, not really theitsts, and warned sternly of the dangers of ‘god reference’, insisting on pointing only, with a glyph for the unamable, IHVH, soon its coopte in the degenerate ‘Jehovah’.
In a way the point is obvious: evolution invokes design inference, but the trap is to cheat on the argument and then sneak the dated and obsolete theism of the Old Testament, confounding the issue. The obvious agenda of natural selection is to try and force the issue with the natural selection fallacy. Times have changed and evidence of design now seems more obviously to be unable to resolve the issues of theism. Prior beliefs in divinity in the Christian brand fail to grapple with the issue. Design in nature is a scientific issue without so far any real science, it would be of a type we can’t yet resolve to naturalistic laws known so far. Scientists can’t live with ambiguity and have foisted a myth of science on the question, to the great discredit to scientific integrity. It is a strange case of the emperor with no clothes. Continue reading “Red Dynamite by Carl R. Weinberg | Paperback “
After Darwinism trust in science will collapse…along with the brazen distortions of Wikipedia…
The puzzle of Darwinism is the simplicity of the error and the failure even of experts in statistics to see the problem…The statistics of natural selection is so clear and transparent that it leaves a puzzle in its wake: how could so many have remained frozen in this fallacy? Fred Hoyle was one of the few really good scientists to expose the obvious fallacy but to no avail. Even Wikipedia is party to the deception with an entry on ‘Hoyle’s Fallacy’ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkyard_tornado), a sophistical entry so fallaciously conformist that I could never again take this encyclopedia seriously again. Such deceptions work: the many who grasp the problem (not a few in the science field) are instantly ostracized as the many submit to the propaganda. Hoyle’s argument about the implausibility of natural selection as a driver of evolution is completely obvious and yet as in the tale of the Emperor with no clothes the public has been persuaded as even the scientific community remains silent. I suspect that most scientists suddenly snap out of the strange delusion but say nothing. So much for science.
The stance of Dawkins has been pernicious here: he is absolutely obsessed with his atheism and clutches at the natural selection argument in terror that evolution could be non-random, chattering teeth. But if evolution is non-random, so what? It does not follow that we can infer divinity behind nature. First and foremost because you can’t define god. Take out a piece of paper and define god and then show how non-random evolution proves the ‘existence’ of such. You won’t succeed. But many monotheists will think the argument valid. But it is not. The second reason is that god concepts historically are too primitive to be used in philosophy and too metaphysical in a Kantian sense to escape antinomial confusion. Let’s be clear, the ‘footprint of Crusoe’ is a design context: we infer a human is present. The whole situation with Friday’s footprint is a design case: we naturally infer the existence of a human. But such logic however cogent in ordinary situations can’t be generalized to cosmic theology. First, ‘god’ and ‘existence’ don’t match: if god existed (in space-time) it/he wouldn’t be ‘god’. God must be beyond existence which means we can’t predicate space-time physics to ‘god’. The whole morass is incoherent and can’t be subjected to Darwinian thinking. The same is true for ‘design’ thinking. Review the history of monotheism: it was a design argument par excellence and yet looking backward see the way the whole question of design by ignoring the Kantian limits of metaphysics became pernicious. It seems logical to infer mind in nature given evidence of design. But the inference is not science or logically established with a proof, and the distinction of ‘nature’ and ‘god’ still remains, further compounding confusion. The further reason is that you must be constructivist and explicitly define that ‘other’ you have egregious declared to exist after a simplistic and basically pagan version of a divinity. Ironically pagan versions of ‘divinities’ are not subject to the same skepticism, superstition though they be.
Let’s recall that the ancient Israelites originally forbade references to ‘god’, reversing mention to a glyph or token, IHVH. That soon degenerated into the pop theism that has cursed religion ever since.
So we should not consigned to evolutionary understanding with the stupidity of random evolution via natural selection. Science may never really recover from so much muddle, if not actually deception.
And it is so easy to take a sane approach to ‘evolution’: we the empirical reality of evolution in deep time, but so far its mechanisms elude us. The design factor in evolution is clear, but it has no theological implications.
Meanwhile Hoyle got it basically right: probability makes natural selection extremely unlikely
This is hardly anything we didn’t know twenty years ago, and yet nothing changes. The design argument is somehow transparent but the proponents of ID (intelligent design) have spoiled their c…
Why Are Science Reporters So Credulous?
As a secular student of evolution and the ‘design’ issue I am repeatedly astonished at the rote endorsement of Darwinism in the press, in academic and finally biology fields. It is also suspiciously clear that much of this is outright deception, lying, and disinformation at work. The reality is that any dissent on the natural selection issue(s) can be dangerous to careers and woe to those who don’t conform. The flaw in Darwinian statistics is utterly basic, and yet generations of students get their statistical reasoning cashiered with the Orwellian double think of natural selection. It is almost impossible to penetrate this stultified mindset.
This includes the so-called ‘left’ which routinely exposes much of the deception in capitalist promo/ideology and many other issues yet never dares to critique Darwinism, a cowardly and disgraceful minus in their credibility.
One might argue that as with Dawkins the fundamentalist Darwinians are fearful of the theological obsessions on the right and that the design argument is crypto-theological propaganda, but that is less and less true, if it ever was: one can affirm the presence if design in nature without buying the theology at all. There is universal failure all around to consider the issues in a Kantin vein where the attempts to use design to prove the existence of god were scotched long ago. It is important to consider design in nature because the issue is finally a scientific one.
If, or when, design should overtake blind Darwinian processes as the favored explanation for biological complexity, what Nicholas Wade calls the “temple of science” would really and truly be rocked. Regarding the origins of that complexity, protecting “their sources’ interests” explains why reporting about evolutionary biology needs such intense scrutiny.
Source: Why Are Science Reporters So Credulous? | Evolution News
Excerpt from Richard Weikart’s new book, Darwinian Racism –
It was the spring of 1999, a Denver suburb. The day, April 20 — Adolf Hitler’s birthday. An 18-year-old white nationalist, Eric Harris, donned a shirt emblazoned with “Natural Selection” before heading off to high school. For weeks he had been preparing a special event in honor of the Führer. Together with a co-conspirator, Dylan Klebold, he planted a bomb in the Columbine High School cafeteria. Harris planned to shoot his fellow students as they fled the explosion. When the bomb failed to detonate, he and Klebold entered the school and opened fire, killing 13 and wounding 24 before turning their guns on themselves.Why was Harris — as are many white nationalists today — so eager to honor both Hitler and Darwin? Why did he think Darwin’s theory of natural selection provided fodder for his white nationalist ideology?If we delve deeply into the ideology of Nazis, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists, we find that Darwinism — the view that species have evolved over eons of time through the process of natural selection — plays a fundamental role, shaping their views about race and society.Richard Weikart, “Darwinian Racism: How Evolutionary Theory Shaped Nazi Thinking” at Evolution News and Science Today (February 2, 2022)
Source: Excerpt from Richard Weikart’s new book, Darwinian Racism – Uncommon Descent
Fodor and Nagel and the braindead realm of academic zombies on evolution…
We will relist these two books without the garbled review: they are both important works and shows that something is stirring in academia, but I have to wonder if these books had any effect. Guess what the world of academia, as evidenced by the reign of Darwinism. It is an extraordinary record: almost the entire field of biology (in the US, mostly elsewhere) cannot debrief the theory of natural selection, one that as Nagel points out strikes amateurs as obviously wrong and implausible. And yet all the products of the university system are conditioned in a cyrpto-ideological mindset. Some have blamed this on capitalism ideology and the way Darwin’s theory promotes competition and survival of the fittest, also two capitalist favorites. The integrity of science is at risk, but nothing can seem to penetrate the false awareness here.
What Darwin Got Wrong.
Fodor Jerry
Piattelli-Palmarini Massimo
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Nagel Thomas
1848+: The End(s) of History 