Evolution Is Wrong

via videosift.com

According to the simplistic arguments presented in this clip - based on the ideas of Adnan Oktar, the islamist creationist - because some species have not changed in hundreds of millions of years, all life was created at once. He uses numerous fossil examples and compares them with almost unchanged living species today to prove that evolution did not happen.

We estimate that there are between seven to one hundred million different living species today - numbers vary because of issues categorising species - some of them are bound to not need to evolve. To be so well niched at one point that major changes become unnecessary and the form stabilises.

Of course he doesn't mention the fact that there are no human fossils dating hundreds of millions of years, but oddly, and contrary to Bible-bound American creationists, he admits to those millions of years.

Here's a nice example of propaganda for you. It uses all the tricks in the book to sustain Oktar's fallacious argument that Darwin was wrong. About a third of the program is spent on pseudo-scientific explanations of the process of fossilisation, another third tells without giving any facts that all sciences have proofs against evolution and the last consist of enumeration of species that haven't changed.

All with dramatic music, fast editing, lush 3D animations, quality graphics and diagrams, lies and wide approximations, and a smirk in the narrator's voice.

Momentous Event

Benevolent Design

Evil proven. Maybe more than an indifferent universe.

It is fearsome. And it somewhat legitimizes this need to fantasize on an imaginary benevolent designer. But it is now safe to say that observations and measurements have shown no trace of such benevolence in the known universe.

Other than for small occasional "pockets of luck", this is a dangerous place.

Undirected

In an attempt to reconcile Darwin and faith , a christian theologist presents a god that is continuously engaged in the creative process through undirected natural selection (Scientific American, Nov 2008).


Why do we absolutely require an intent behind everything? Does something like a universe necessarily abslolutely require an intent to be and become?

I think it comes from our survival instincts (the animal again) when we need to predict what our predator will do next. For this we have learned to imagine intent, and now there's even a part of our brain that's been identified, closely related to the empathy centers, as active when we try to find a meaning to something, and I'm pretty sure this brain area lights up when religious people think of and/or relate to god, and the creation of the universe.

In Other News

There is apparently an increase in the numbers of biology teachers that promote creationism as a valid hypothesis... I'd love to hear their own personal compromise between this idea of intent and what the whole of science seems to be revealing, that the universe just grew.


As I said in the first post of this blog, " I have now come to the conclusion that pretending, teaching or preaching anything else (than up-to-date scientific knowledge) is dangerous." and I might add, should be fought.