Evolution Says Indians Deserved Death ( Archived) (266)

Well of course, we are.
Well till those weird movies come true that I watched while growing up. Like Logan's run and Soilent Green. Eeeeeeek

Thanks for a red herring fallacy.

Cont. on with Darwin:
For those who might object to the point that the potted notion of science meticulously gathering facts and then coming up with theories to explain them is just an idealized caricature. I can agree with that many fruitful lines of discovery have developed from someone's hatching an idea and then going out into the real world in search of evidence to support or disconfirm it. Collecting all the raw data that the world has to offer is almost an impossible task but some form of filtering criterion has to be applied to know what kind of facts to look for. But ideas at that at stage of development are usually properly termed hypotheses which are supposed to be tentatively held, modestly proclaimed, and highly sensitive to rejection or advancement depending on the findings. This does not at all describe the fanfare of academic effervence and political acclaim that followed Darwin's publication. This was all the more remarkable when the promised plethora of confirmatory evidence failed to materialize, and what kept turning up, continued obstinately to point the wrong way, as to this day.
An essential feature of Darwinian theory was that changes take place gradually as the progressive accumulations of countless advantages selected from the range of variations appearing with every generation over huge spans of time. Sudden major transformations such as from a reptile to a bird or from a fish to a reptile; from a fish fin to a leg, required the chance occurrence of too many changes that had to be just right all at the same time, to be credible. It followed that what we think of as "species" are just as much transitions on their way to whatever they will become in the future as everything making up the line of descent that led to them. Over the huge spans of time involved, therefore, the intermediate forms connecting back to the distant ancestor would be expected to vastly outnumber the descendants identifiable today, and hence to exhibit at least some of these unmistakable signs of the chains of steady improvements that life was supposed to consist of.
What the fossil records actually show over and over again was a pattern of species, orders, and whole phyla appearing suddenly, fully differentiated and specialized, with absolutely no lines of transitionals linking them back to simpler things.
The last ichthyosaurus, marking the disappearance of the genus from the chalk, was barely distinguishable from the earliest ichthyosaurus, which appeared abruptly. The oldest pterodactyl was as fully formed and complete as the latest. This too, was known in Darwin's time, but played down on the grounds that the record was incomplete.
Although the claim is still heard today, it doesn't really wash. The world's fossil collections are far larger now, their representation of the full picture can no longer be doubted, and from the Darwinian view that picture is much worse than it ever was almost two centuries ago.
Moreover, it is upside down compared to what the theory would predict. Instead of a pattern of increasing diversity branching outward in time as new forms emerged, the records show that series of epochs ending abruptly in widespread mass extinctions, followed by rapid re-population with radically new body plans appearing suddenly alongside what had survived of the old. Within these epochs diversity was greatest at the beginning, the initial forms either remaining pretty much the same or becoming extinct as nature worked to winnow out the less-well adapted in the way that had always been maintained.

How about shorter posts?

Darwin continued:
A myth that has persisted through to modern day biology is that the opposition to Darwin's theory was motivated by religious prejudice. In fact, the strongest criticisms came from ranks of field biologists and naturalists, including many prominent names of the day. It is still, today, very much the same, still on the grounds following from familiarity with the evidence. They saw and still see the vast gulfs of differences that were very real; are very real, and they required something much more solid to bridge them with than Darwin's imagination and religious ideologies.
From the standpoint of just molecular sequencing shows is that exactly as predicted; the same kind of totally disconnected typological ordering, from which evidence of evolution was, is emphatically missing when dealing with DNA structures, and all the amino acid chains that make up proteins and the determinations of those DNA structures as the carriers of hereditary information.
The other main objection to Darwin's theory, which did owe more to theological inclinations than the absence of transitions in the fossil evidence, was that unguided natural processes could not have produced the complexity and perfection that has been seen. Darwin's great claim to fame, of course, was that he had come up with a mechanism that could 'explain' it all.
The best known argument on these lines is William Paley's example of a finding a watch, which he compared in intricacy and the precise interactions of its parts with organs like the eye that are found in nature. It would be inconceivable, Paley asserted, that the watch could have produced and assembled itself, and even if the finder didn't know the purpose of the watch, he would infer it to be the product of a designing intelligence. Likewise, the wondrous adaptions of means to ends
that are found in nature.
An increasing number of scientific and other professionals who have no religious axes to grind are coming to the unavoidable conclusion, purely from the evidence, that the possibility of intelligent design at work is a very real one that warrants serious consideration, and that this should be acknowledged by the educational systems, along with the findings that may be criticisms of the current theory, especially in the US. But any advocacy in this direction is greeted by outrage and outcries from scientific and legal quarters as wanting to 'teach creationism' or 'ban evolution'. It is to be expected that such a movement will atrract those of the narrowest and most fundamentalist persuations. But holding that the only alternative to one extreme is the opposite extreme, and that rejecting or even questioning Darwinism is automatically to insist on a 6,000 year old earth and literal Genesis, imposes an insanely false dichotomy.
Truth doesn't demand a monopoly platform and call for dissent to be expunged from classrooms and libraries or home bookshelves. It welcomes the open exploration of alternatives and grants to others the freedom to state their cases. After all, if wanting to learn the truth is the object, what is there to lose? However, if the real objective, perhaps rationalized to the pont of being unconscious, is to defend a position of cultural authority and prestige, and all the benefits that come with it, then there would be quite a lot to lose indeed!

How about shorter posts instead of monology?



In real world DNA is the strongest evidence for evolution.



This is a classic example of false analogy.



Like Behe and Demski? Have you heard of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case?