…that evolution doesn’t say a thing about how life began.
The whole evolution debate has been going for too fucking long for these idiots to keep bringing up this strawman.
There is a whole other field of study called abiogenesis that deals with the beginning of life.
The next time I hear someone talk evolution being a theory about how life began, I am going to suggest she protest abiogenesis instead. Or better yet, I am going to ask her to write down on a piece of paper “Evolution is a flawed theory about the origins of life.” Then I going to take the piece of paper, piss on it, and shove it down her throat.
But I guess these people are better than those other idiots that bring the Big Bang up in the evolution debate.
Good to know that we now have Tony Snow, creationist, in charge of official bullshit at the White House now. I suppose that if you wanted a chief bullshit officier, you couldn’t do much worse than a journalist who’s also a creationist.
They’ll keep bringing it up as lng as they get other idiots to either buy into it or dignify it in any way. I don’t give a fuck what they believe. It’s the way they try to MAKE other people listen, and try to influnce what other people believe that gets me. Maybe Frank Zappa was right about the coming of a theocracy.
Here’s a couple of more things that piss me off beside the ignorant but obligatory conflation of evolution with abiogenesis. One, that evolutionary Theory is “Darwin’s explanation.” as though it’s all just a hypothesis that Darwin came up with and that it doesn’t have more than a century of hard research and confirmation behimd it. The other is the pronouncemnet that evolutionary theory has “flaws.” No it doesn’t. If they teach that it has flaws, they’re just lying.
I don’t think that is right. Almost any scientific theory has flaws as it can only be based on the evidence that we have on hand. That is why we continue to research into fields. It allows us to identify errors and to correct for them. While there is no current evidence of a specific flaw in the theory of evolution (if there was it would have to be accounted for in the theory), we can be almost absolutely sure that the theory will continue to be revised due to flaws.
There may be mistakes or gaps of knowledge in specific pathways or timelines or machanisms but there aren’t any flaws in the basic theory itself – that is, there are no problems with the fundamentals like common descent, adaptation and natural selection. I think the proposed legislation is written to suggest that those things are in any scientific doubt. If a school was to teach, for instance, that there is any doubt about common descent, that would constitute flat-out lying.
Creationism typically includes the special creation of humans. I doubt Snow would be to happy with the special creation of the first RNA molecule, and no interference thereafter.
And I thought it would be hard to bring down the average intelligence of this administration - yet they’ve outdone themselves.
I won’t even acknowledge any gaps anymore, myself. It’s a now old tactic - there are gaps, so that means there must be more gaps we don’t know about, so it all must be questioned, or refuted, or shown as proof that IDers are right. They even have a name for it - the “god of the gap” argument. God of the Gap was what the whole “complexity of the eyeball” was, once you peel away the bull shit window dressing.
I don’t get this animosity towards Snow around here. I’ve been listening to journalists from the left and the right talk about him in the last few days, and they seem generally to respect him quite a bit. I haven’t heard even former Clinton spokespersons say anything but good things about him. Why not give him a chance and see what kind of job he does before dumping on him? As said in another thread, most Americans can be described as “creationists”. Is it your contention that all of those people are incapable of being honest?
Psh. “Snow” is just the Symbol of Rightist Evil, a micro-soundbite, if you will, that the unthinking left trots out when it’s too lazy to get any facts.
And both my freshman and AP biology textbooks put abiogenesis right together with evolution. There was no separation of the two topics, and it was implied that the mechanisms of abiogenesis are just as scientifically established as those of microevolution and natural selection. There is most definitely a reason for the two to be connected in the original law.
What the fuck is this supposed to mean? I can’t figure out how any of the words in this paragraph have any reference to anything else in the thread.
This is all horseshit, of course…unless you had a creationist textbook. Either that or you just completely lack all reading comprehension. Evolution has nothing to do with how life began. If you could prove today that God personally created the first life forms, the Theory of Evolution would be completely unaffected. There are no alternative scientific theories to the ToE, it is not in doubt, and there has never been any suggestion in the scientific community (much less any textbooks) that the “mechanisms of abiogenesis” have been remotely established. There are several hypotheses but none of them have yet risen to the level of “theory,” and investigation in that area is completely unrelated to evolution. Your textbooks said no such thing.