I would like to increase your evolutionary fitness by having your babies.
Agreed, but it does preclude a god who wrote a bible saying that “I created man in my own image.” In other words, catholics must believe that humans would come into existence eventually, and that belief is incompatible with the theory of evolution.
Doesn’t mean that at all. You do know that Catholics interpret scripture along with sacred tradition and the decrees of the Pope and religious councils. Indeed, fundamentalists typically assert that Catholics pay insufficient attention to scripture.
This leftist here does not agree with all your examples.
BTW I doubt the bit of “the faked moon landing theory seems to have been part of the Cuban school curriculum at one time.” I looked at it before in GQ, an I found a Russian teacher in Cuba posting about the anniversary of the moon landing several years ago.
So out with it Mr. Moto, what sources did you rely on?
Life appeared on this planet rather some time prior to “the last few million years”…
So you believe catholics are perfectly fine with the idea that humans exist only because conditions became right for mammals and then for smart mammals? If I said to the pope, “Hey pope, it is possible that humans never existed ever in the whole history of the universe,” you think he’d say “yep”?
Amen to that.
I think much of the discussion on who believes in evolution depends upon what is meant by evolution. I think that most conservatives believe in evolution…to a degree. In other words, they think evolution exists as a means of adaptation but not as a means of creating life itself. So when they say they don’t believe in evolution, what they are really saying is that they don’t think that the complex organisms we know as living beings occurred as a random collision of various molecules, proteins or whatever over and over again until they somehow morphed into intelligent creatures. And I don’t believe evolution has satisfactorily explained just how life came into being in the first place, nor has it explained how certain life forms separated into separate, inter-dependent sexes reliant upon each other for procreation, and it hasn’t explained why these adaptations were necessary evolutionarily in the first place since the various organisms on the planet were already reproducing to begin with. In other words, what was the evolutionary pressure that caused this splitting off of the sexes to occur in the first place, and how did these various organisms survive and reproduce while it was taking place? So when people call evolution a theory, many of them are talking about its supposed role in creating life and all it’s complex processes in the first place, and not that evolution as an adaptive process doesn’t exist at all. Same with evolution itself.
This is about four different kinds of stupid, although considering the source that’s not too surprising.
Equating socialism to creationism, or free market ideology to belief in evolution, completely misses the crucial distinction between normative and positive economics.
Most liberal and leftist and even socialist economists and political commentators do not reject the law of supply and demand. Most of them, in fact, are perfectly happy to concede that fundamental microeconomic principles associated with scarcity, supply and demand, opportunity cost, equilibrium, etc.,etc. do a pretty good job of describing and explaining people’s behavior and changes in the economy.
There are positive, factual questions that economics can answer, especially regarding things that have already happened (prediction is far more problematic, despite the confidence that some economists seem to have in their predictive abilities). It is possible to look at an economic system, evaluate the changes made to it and the consequences of those changes, and draw some interesting and valuable scientifically positive conclusions. It’s not always *easy *to do, and depending upon their methods, some economists might draw slightly different conclusions from others, but there is an important positive, factual component here.
We might, for example, conclude from our theories and our observations that an economy works most efficiently when we leave it to operate without external interference. I’m not conceding that this is always the case, and in fact economists even sometimes disagree over what exactly constitutes external interference, but let’s roll with it for a moment.
But even if we do conclude that a free market is the most efficient, this does not, by itself, mean that support for socialist economics is factually incorrect, or that it is based on ignorance or lack of education. It could be that, in some cases, socialist economists make the normative judgment that efficiency is not the most important factor in the economy, and that some economies might, in fact, distribute their wealth more equitably if we interfere with the market in particular ways. Equity might be considered a more valuable determinant of an economy’s social value than efficiency. Economics is, after all, a human and social science, one concerned with understanding what people do and how they relate to one another.
You are welcome to disagree with this normative decision regarding equity over efficiency, but it’s a decision that is not necessarily the result of ignorance of the law of supply and demand. It is perfectly possible to both accept the law of supply and demand, on the one hand, and to argue that society needs to interfere in the free market, on the other. Socialist economics is not more or less inherently ignorant or fact-based than free-market economics. And, just like socialist economists, those who support an uninhibited free market are taking a normative, moral position, not simply a factual one.
I agree with Rand Rover here that Keyenesian economics, as a general principle, is not simply a fact, or a set of facts. Calling Keynesian economics, in the aggregate, “factual” is basically nonsensical. There are many factual statements that can be made about what types of policies constitute Keynesian economics, or about the consequences of particular Keynesian policies, or about Keynesian economics as a whole, but even if we were all to agree on what those facts are, we still might not all agree about what conclusions to draw regarding the social desirability of this particular economic model. And exactly the same positive and normative strictures apply to Hayekian or Misesian or Friedmanite economics.
It is actually an old chestnut: the assumption that Evolution scientists deal with the origin of life, they don’t.
This position of yours is ignorant in the extreme.
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/misconceps/IAorigintheory.shtml
This is simply perfect. Almost a case of meta-ignorance.
James Oberg. If he is shown to be wrong I will own up to it, but his assertion is reprinted in many places.
Thanks for posting this GIGObuster.
Starving Artist has inadvertently pointed out that those who do not “believe” in evolution don’t even know the first thing about it. I’ve often heard people talk about evolution and abiogenesis as if they were the same thing; They are not.
Similarly, their “arguments” against evolution reveal a similar ignorance about what evolution even is in the first place.
And the political group with the greatest proportion of evolution-deniers? Republicans.
So it’s a question of whether evolutionary theory can explain the existence of:
a. sugar
b. porridge
c. Scotsmen
IIRC that was the same source also mentioned in the GQ thread, and I also found him as the same source on many others. I would be in agreement if there were other corroborations, but seeing that the official voices from the communist world congratulated -reluctantly- the Americans I have to wonder what would be gained by teaching your future “party members” otherwise.
http://209.104.5.198/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11573010&postcount=11
Also it would be peculiar to teach that in schools and at the same time show on the official Cuban national TV a documentary celebrating the moon landings.
:rolleyes: times infinity plus one.
You can’t spell C-R-E-A-T-I-O-N without C-R-E-T-I-N.
Right - but there is the strong possibility that what was in schoolbooks in the 1969 era changed over time in Cuba. Happens here too.
In any case, this being something I can’t cite with confidence, I’ll gladly drop it. There are many other examples around that I can cite, including the peculiar Italian fear of air conditioning. 
Come on, Moto, you’re better than that.
A single, unsupported assertion that has managed to gain traction and has been cut-and-pasted all over the web? Is that really something that qualifies as a reasonable source? If i offered something similar as evidence of some sort of conservative perfidy or other, you would rightly howl in protest.
I just did a search in JSTOR and Project MUSE scholarly article databases, both of which cover very large collections of journals in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database (covering the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Guardian and Observer, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post), and found nothing about the Cubans teaching that Apollo was a hoax. A search of Lexis/Nexis was similarly unsuccessful; the only time Cuba appeared in a story about Apollo or the moon landings was when the writer connected the space race with other Cold War developments like the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis.
On preview, i see you’re willing to drop it, which is good. As a general principle, though, an assertion as straightforward and bold as that should require more evidence than “some guy on the internet.”
:smack: Damn, this place makes my ass twitch sometimes!
I didn’t inadvertently point it out, it was the point of the whole damn post…that when people say they don’t believe in evolution, or the ‘theory of evolution’, they’re talking about evolution as abiogenesis.
And to a large degree the reason for this is the way evolution has been promoted by the left, which is by saying that creationism isn’t responsible for what we know as life today, evolution is. So if you want to make fun of people who confuse evolution with abiogenesis, remember they only believe that because of what YOU’VE said. 