8.
You think our modern understanding of it rests on a long series of
hoaxes perpetuated by scientists.
Affirmed
by the likes of everyone’s favorite nut-job conspiracy theorist
meets cartoonist, Jack Chick, this idea is alive and well in
evangelical culture. And why shouldn’t it be? Repeatedly assured by
young-earth creationist groups that there is “absolutely no
evidence for evolution,” what else would explain the theory’s
unshakable dominance in the scientific community, courts and public
schools besides a vast atheist conspiracy? And so, young-earthers on
the Internet commonly parrot blatant falsehoods like “Archaeopteryx
was a hoax”... and “Java Man and Peking Man were frauds”.
Let
me start with a quick clarification. Evolution is indeed the
prevailing opinion within the scientific community – presumably
because they feel it's supported by the evidence (but maybe more so
because it's the only theory that fits the
“natural-explanations-only” paradigm which I'll address in a
moment). However, “the theory's
unshakable dominance” in the courts and public schools
is not because the evidence for it is so overwhelming. It is because
any criticism of the theory in a public school is challenged in court
as a violation of the so-called “separation of church and state.”
To my knowledge, no court has ever tried the evidence for evolution
and judged it to be true. Rather, any competing theory – indeed,
any criticism of the theory – is simply declared a religious belief
and, so, is banned from public schools.
OK,
back to the point. I absolutely believe that, if more people
understood evolution, fewer people would believe it. The acceptance
of evolution by the lay public has been made more successful by
intentional deception committed by the scientific community. I
wouldn't call it a hoax, per se, because the scientists may actually believe this one interpretation of the evidence. Is it a conspiracy? I'm reluctant to use
that word because it is so often associated with people like Jesse
Ventura. There is definitely something going on in the scientific
community. For the lay public, academia allows untruths and
half-truths about evolution to continue to be believed by the masses.
I'm not even talking about Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man, which
Francke mention in his article. I'm talking about modern examples of
objectively false information currently believed by the public to be
evidence for evolution.
I
could talk about the persistent spin that evolution has been declared
true by the supreme court but I've already discussed that. Let's
see... oh, here's one: Have you ever heard that human and chimp DNA
is 98% similar? This is often cited as “proof” that humans and
chimps are related. But have you ever heard the people who cite this
statistic also explain that chimp DNA is 10% longer than human DNA?
I'll bet you haven't.
In
the book, Anthropology:
The Human Challenge, we find the following quote: Moreover,
the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative
differences among genomes. Genetic evolution involves much more than
simply replacing one base with another. Thus, even among such close
relatives as human and chimpanzee, we find that the chimp’s genome
is estimated to be about 10 percent larger than the human’s....
[T]he tips of each chimpanzee chromosome contain a DNA sequence that
is not present in humans.
The
seemingly amazing 98% similarity is achieved only by comparing
sections of the DNA and not the entire genome!
Of course, the lay public thinks our DNA (the entire genome) is
nearly identical to a chimp's. A letter by letter comparison of the
entire genome shows human and chimp DNA is only 70-80% similar.
I'll
give only one more example of a commonly believed lie. Have you ever
heard that 99% of all the species that have ever lived are now
extinct? If life evolved from a single cell to everything that
exists today, it would sort of make sense there would have been
countless species in between. I heard an evolutionist once say in a
debate that we see this in the fossil record. What a liar! Did you
know there are more identified species living today than there are
extinct species found in the fossil record? I'll bet you didn't.
The statistic is merely an estimate that makes certain assumptions
about how long ago the first life form appeared and how long it takes
new species to appear. There are about 1.7 million species that have been named. There are maybe 10,000,000 that are believed to exist
but haven't been classified or even discovered. Compare that to only
250,000-500,000 extinct species known only from fossils. There is NO
fossil evidence for “billions of species” having lived in the
past.
There
are many, many other other examples of these types of “factoids”
that are either blatant lies or grossly misunderstood. I've even
written a list of 10
common lies told by evolutionists. Yet lay people believe them
and repeat them to support their belief in evolution. What's worse
though – far worse, in fact – is the coordinated effort within
the scientific community to squelch any research that might challenge
evolution.
Since
evolution is not real, it really has no impact on any part of
science. Evolutionary biologists talk a lot about evolution and hash
out their theory in peer reviewed papers but none of their work has
anything to do with science. All other scientists are able to do
their work just fine without ever thinking about evolution. If
everything we think we know about evolution turned out to be wrong,
no one else would change a single thing about the research they're
doing right now. It makes me a little curious about why they so
zealously defend a theory that contributes so little to science.
The
first reason is because they have a commitment to naturalism.
Scientific
American admits to a natural bias. In an article containing 15
half-truths and strawmen aimed at confusing the public, they said
this:
A
central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism—it
seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable
natural mechanisms.
You'll
have to ignore the irony for a moment – like, how can I observe or
test this tenet of science? My point in quoting this is to show how
mainstream science has disqualified, a
priori,
a miraculous creation as a possible explanation of the universe. Not
because they've carefully studied the evidence for creation and are
more persuaded by the arguments for evolution. No, it's because of
their tenet – an
opinion, belief, or principle that is held as absolute truth – that
says they will only ever consider a natural explanation for anything.
Ben
Stein made a movie several years ago called, Expelled:
No Intelligence Allowed, where he detailed some of the systematic
discrimination in the scientific community against creationists and
proponents of Intelligent Design. This has always been the case and
I've observed it for decades.
From
one Answers
in Genesis article, we find the following quote:
In
the summer of 1985 Humphreys wrote to the journal Science
pointing out that openly creationist articles are suppressed by most
journals. He asked if Science
had “a hidden policy of suppressing creationist letters.”
Christine Gilbert, the letters editor, replied and admitted, “It is
true that we are not likely to publish creationist letters.”
In
2004, Smithsonian editor, Richard Sternberg dared to allow a paper
favoring intelligent design to be published. In
his account of the “controversy” he said, Because
Dr. Meyer’s article presented scientific evidence for intelligent
design in biology, I faced retaliation, defamation, harassment, and a
hostile work environment at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
Natural History that was designed to force me out as a Research
Associate there. These actions were taken by federal government
employees acting in concert with an outside advocacy group, the
National Center for Science Education. Efforts were also made to get
me fired from my job as a staff scientist at the National Center for
Biotechnology Information.
Very
early in my blogging career, I
wrote about the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution firing a
researcher solely
because he was a creationist.
In a Boston.com
article about the case, Woods Hole, studies
how aquatic animals respond to chemical contaminants by examining '.
. . mechanisms from
a comparative/evolutionary perspective.'
Did you catch that? “from
an evolutionary perspective.”
Anyway, Hahn, the senior scientist as Woods Hole is quoted as
saying, This
position is incompatible with the work as proposed to NIH and with my
own vision of how it should be carried out and interpreted.
In
other words, Woods Hole only ever considers the evidence from an
evolutionary perspective and is not interested in hiring someone who
interprets the evidence any other way.
Just recently, Bob Enyart, a radio talk-show host and creationist, offered Jack Horner, a paleontologist, a $20,000 grant if Horner would just give permission to test a t-rex fossil for carbon-14. After much hemming and hawing, Horner refused saying, Your group is a group of creationists and... and... and... the spin they could get off of it, doing it, is not gonna help us.
I've
heard a thousand times that science goes wherever the evidence leads.
Perhaps I should add that to my list of lies evolutionists tell.
They refuse to consider any evidence that goes against their precious
theory. They organize groups like NCSE
to make sure nothing critical of evolution is ever spoken in public schools. If a
teacher so much as says, “we should critically examine evolution,” he is branded a creationists and slapped with a lawsuit. Any scientist
who is even suspected of being sympathetic to creationism is at risk
of losing his job. Is it a conspiracy? Well, if it looks like a
duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then maybe it is a
duck.
2 comments:
You'll have to ignore the irony for a moment – like, how can I observe or test this tenet of science?
What is the evidence that explanations should fit the evidence? If you don't assume that they should, what evidence could possibly persuade you? Or, conversely, how do magic or miracles "explain" anything? An explanation is an account of why things are this way rather than that conceivable contrary way, by citing causes that produce the effects we see rather than other effects we don't see. An attempt to explain things, in terms of causes capable of producing any effect the Causer arbitrarily wishes, explains nothing.
Now, if you wish to posit enough detail about the Creator's motives and values (and limitations and constraints, if any) that we can actually say "this fits what the Creator would do" and "that does not fit what the Creator would do," then in fact Creationism would be a scientific hypothesis. But a declaration that we are not entitled to ask about the Creator's methods, goals, and desires when considering whether something is "intelligently designed" is an admission that "intelligent design" is basically a "magic of the gaps" hand-wave pretending to be an explanation.
"Evidence against evolution" is not the same thing as "questions evolutionists can't currently answer (although that is the only sort of "evidence" creationists have on offer). "Evidence for creation" is impossible until creationism is willing to make testable predictions (or rather, stick with them: e.g. a six-thousand year old Earth is a perfectly testable prediction, until you decide that all forms of dating that contradict it must be unreliable a priori).
How similar the human and chimpanzee genomes are depends on how one measures the similarity (e.g. if you choose "every non-matching nucleotide" as a "difference" rather than "any difference that could be caused by a single mutation -- such as stretches of thousands of nucleotides that could be caused by a single duplication of translocation of a fragment of the genome," you'll get a larger degree of difference. But the point remains: chimps are more genetically similar to us than they are to gorillas. Both are more similar to us, genetically, that African elephants are to Indian elephants (which may YECs group in a single elephant "kind"). That ought by itself count as a disconfirmation of any testable sort of young-earth creationism.
I infer from the "lies" you complain about that you do not in fact dispute that, e.g. Homo naledi, or the Trinil skullcap, or the Dmanisi skulls, etc. are fake, or that identically-disabled shared pseudogenes in humans and old world anthropoid primates, etc. actually exist (or even that some creationists do, in fact, claim or imply that they do not exist).
Did you know there are more identified species living today than there are extinct species found in the fossil record?
I did know that (hey, I read your blog). And if you assume that all known extinct and extant "kinds" (ca. genus or family level) were alive 5000 years ago, then this is highly relevant. But if you assume that, you really ought to expect, e.g. that recognizable cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) ought to show up in the same sediments as recognizable ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs. They don't, of course. You ought to expect not merely mammals (which exist in abundance in Cretaceous deposits), but specifically felids, canids, bovids, murids, equids, etc. to exist in the same layers as tyrannosaurids or ceratopsids. They don't, of course. Nor do we find, e.g. "mammal-like reptiles" such as Dimetrodon fossilized alongside either non-bird dinosaurs or true mammals. The fossil record is not at all what we would expect if all these different sorts of living things were alive at the same time, but rather what we would expect if different suites of fauna succeeded one another over hundreds of millions of years. And therefore it is far more reasonable to suppose that recently-living species are far, far better represented than species extinct for geological epochs -- and to adjust estimates of the number of species that have lived accordingly.
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