Creationists Establish Foothold In Europe
LONDON - After the Sunday service in Westminster Chapel, where worshippers were exhorted to wage “the culture war” in the World War II spirit of Sir Winston Churchill, cabbie James McLean delivered his verdict on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
“Evolution is a lie, and it’s being taught in schools as fact, and it’s leading our kids in the wrong direction,” said McLean, chatting outside the chapel. “But now people like Ken Ham are tearing evolution to pieces.”
Ken Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, a Kentucky-based organization that is part of an ambitious effort to bring creationist theory to Britain and the rest of Europe. McLean is one of a growing number of evangelicals embracing that message—that the true history of the Earth is told in the Bible, not Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”
Europeans have long viewed the conflict between evolutionists and creationists as primarily an American phenomenon, but it has recently jumped the Atlantic Ocean with skirmishes in Italy, Germany, Poland and, notably, Britain, where Darwin was born and where he published his 1859 classic.
Darwin’s defenders are fighting back. In October, the 47-nation Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog, condemned all attempts to bring creationism into Europe’s schools. Bible-based theories and “religious dogma” threaten to undercut sound educational practices, it charged.
Schools are increasingly a focal point in this battle for hearts and minds. A British branch of Answers in Genesis, which shares a Web site with its American counterpart, has managed to introduce its creationist point of view into science classes at a number of state- supported schools in Britain, said Monty White, the group’s chief executive.
“We do go into the schools about 10 to 20 times a year and we do get the students to question what they’re being taught about evolution,” said White, who founded the British branch seven years ago. “And we leave them a box of books for the library.”
Creationism is still a marginal issue here compared with its impact on cultural and political debate in the United States. But the budding fervor is part of a growing embrace of evangelical worship throughout much of Europe. Evangelicals say their ranks are swelling as attendance at traditional churches declines because of revulsion with the hedonism and materialism of modern society.
“People are looking for spirituality,” White said in an interview at his office in Leicester, 90 miles north of London. “I think they are fed up with not finding true happiness. They find having a bigger car doesn’t make them happy. They get drunk and the next morning they have a hangover. They take drugs but the drugs wear off. But what they find with Christianity is lasting.”
Other British organizations have joined the crusade. A group called Truth in Science has sent thousands of unsolicited DVDs to every high school in Britain arguing that mankind is the result of “intelligent design,” not Darwinian evolution.
In addition, the AH Trust, a charity, has announced plans to raise money for construction of a Christian theme park in northwest England with a 5,000-seat television studio that would be used for the production of Christian-oriented films. And several TV stations are devoted full-time to Christian themes.
All this activity has lifted spirits at the Westminster Chapel, a 165- year-old evangelical church that is not affiliated with nearby Westminster Abbey, where Darwin is buried.
In the chapel, Rev. Greg Haslam tells the 150 believers that they are in a conflict with secularism that can only be won if they heed Churchill’s exhortation and never, ever give up.
“The first thing you have to do is realize we are in a war, and identify the enemy, and learn how to defeat the enemy,” he said.
There is a sense inside the chapel that Christian evangelicals are successfully resisting a trend toward a completely secular Britain.
“People have walked away from God; it’s not fashionable,” said congregant Chris Mullins, a civil servant. “But the evangelical church does seem to be growing and I’m very encouraged by that. In what is a very secular society, there are people returning to God.”
School curricula generally hold that Darwin’s theory has been backed up by so many scientific discoveries that it can now be regarded as fact. But Mullins believes creationism also deserves a hearing in the classroom.
“Looking at the evidence, creationism at the least seems a theory worthy of examination,” he said. “Personally I think it is true and I think the truth will win out eventually. It’s a question of how long it takes.”
Terry Sanderson, president of Britain’s National Secular Society, a prominent group founded in 1866 to limit the influence of religious leaders, fears the groups advocating a literal interpretation of the Bible are making headway.
“Creationism is creeping into the schools,” he said. “There is a constant pressure to get these ideas into the schools.”
The trend goes beyond evangelical Christianity. Sanderson said the British government is taking over funding of about 100 Islamic schools even though they teach the Quranic version of creationism. He said the government fear imposing evolution theory on the curriculum lest it be branded as anti-Islamic.
The Council of Europe spoke up last fall after Harun Yahya, a prominent Muslim creationist in Turkey, tried to place his lavishly produced 600-page book, “The Atlas of Creation,” in public schools in France, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain.
“These trends are very dangerous,” said Anne Brasseur, author of the Council of Europe report, in an interview.
Brasseur said recent skirmishes in Italy and Germany illustrate the creationists’ tactics. She said Italian schools were ordered to stop teaching evolution when Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister, although the edict seems to have had little impact in practice. In Germany, she said, a state education minister briefly allowed creationism to be taught in biology class.
The rupture between theology and evolution in Europe is relatively recent. For many years people who held evangelical views also endorsed mainstream scientific theory, said Simon Barrow, co-director of Ekklesia, a British-based, Christian-oriented research group. He said the split was imported from the United States in the last decade.
“There is a lot of American influence, and there are a lot of moral and political and financial resources flowing from the United States to here,” he said. “Now you have more extreme religious groups trying to get a foothold.”
In some cases, the schools have become the battlegrounds. Richard Dawkins, the Oxford university biologist and author of last year’s international best-seller “The God Delusion, “frequently lectures students about the marvels of evolution only to find that the students’ views have already been shaped by the creationist lobby.
“I think it’s so sad that children should be fobbed off with these second-rate myths,” he said.
“The theory of evolution is one of the most powerful pieces of scientific thinking ever produced and the evidence for it is overwhelming. I think creationism is pernicious because if you don’t know much it sounds kind of plausible and it’s easy to come into schools and subvert children.”
White, the director of the British Answers in Genesis, is well aware that the group’s school program is contentious. The group has removed information about it from its Web site to avoid antagonizing people.
The group operates a warehouse with $150,000 worth of DVDs, books and comics promoting creationism, but he says he only sends speakers and materials into schools that invite Answers in Genesis to make a presentation.
White, 63, said he was raised as an atheist, and after earning a doctorate in chemistry, embraced evangelical Christianity in 1964.
He says that when he is asked to speak to science classes, he challenges the accuracy of radioactive dating which shows the world to be thousands of millions of years old and says that the Bible is a more accurate description of how mankind began. He personally believes the Earth is between 6,000 and 12,000 years old.
“Usually I find the discussion goes on science, science, and science and then when the lesson is finished one or two students say, ‘Can we talk about other things?’ and I sit down with them and usually they want to talk about Christianity,” he said. “They want to know, why do you believe in God? Why do you believe in the Bible? How can you be sure it’s the word of God?”
Dawkins feels the effect. He said he is discouraged when he visits schools and gets questions from students who have obviously been influenced by material from Answers in Genesis. “I continually get the same rather stupid points straight from their pamphlets,” he said.
White is getting ready for a visit by Ken Ham, who will preach at Westminster Chapel this spring. Meanwhile he is pleased that small groups of creation science advocates now meet regularly in Oxford, Edinburgh, Northampton and other British cities.
“The creation movement is certainly growing,” he said. “There are more groups than there were five years ago. There are more people like me going out speaking about it, and there’s more interest. You have these little groups forming all over the place.”
(AP)
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Personally I always felt the more you know the better your understanding and the better decision you can make…so teach both side of the issue or neither should be taught in schools.
February 9th, 2008 at 10:27 amIn a radio interview in the 20’s Thomas Huxley was asked why evolution became so accepted by intellectuals in the 19th century so quickly. He said ,”that although they knew that evolution was merely a theory, that the idea of a God somehow interfered with their (intellectuals) sexual mores”
There is no consensus in science. Free thinkers don’t follow a set pattern of thought. They go their own way and think for themselves. Rational thinking, debate and reasoned outcomes are the by-product of such open-minded and reasoned debates. This is the liberalism of a by-gone era.
To wit: Teach all sides of the argument: ie Atheistic Materialism, Theistic Evolution and Special Creation. Let the hearers decide for themselves what they believe after presenting all sides of the argument equally.
Return to the old-school ideals of liberality in thought and in teaching.
Teaching only one side of an argument all the time in schools is not condusive to critical thinking..it is more along the lines of indoctrination.
Rather than waddle like little intellectual ducks, we should teach our children to look at all sides of an issue and reason out their own solutions…as good scientists would.
Learn from the great scientists of the past? Did they follow one way of thinking on a problem? No. They looked at all sides of a problem, and all possible iterations and developed their own well-reasoned solutions.
Stifling debate is for communists, Marxists and Islamofacists. So, let the debate begin in earnest.
February 9th, 2008 at 10:39 amRational thinking, debate and reasoned outcomes are the by-product of such open-minded and reasoned debates.
Well, “rational, reasoned debate” is based upon a set of moral and philosophical assumptions that have their roots, dually, in the moral principles of Christianity and the dialectic of Greek philosophy (whose own original pagan foundations are far closer to Christianity than atheism). Moreover, the foundations of science–from the invention of the university to the modern scientific method–issues out of historical Christian intellectual culture. Any coming to this debate should take note of that.
But this debate is not simply over a theory of origins, or the role of religion in the public square. It is a conflict over the essential questions of man; the mind, the soul, and the nature of reality itself. It is a debate that has been going on since at least ancient Greece and probably far longer.
So, yes, by all means, let us debate (it is, after all, much of what separates from the jihadis), but to use one of my favorite quotes (Jürgen Habermas, a German leftist philosopher and former secularist), “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”
February 9th, 2008 at 11:39 am@David Marcoe
I’m talking about an era is school, where all views on a topic were welcome. That is not the case today. Anyone who thinks otherwise, might try to enroll on any campus and immediately ID themselves as a conservative. They would find out real fast, just how unwelcome that their views are.
Irrespective of where reasoned agumentation comes from, the point is that Creationism vs Evolution IS NOT debated in schools; except as much as one is deemed right and the other deemed ridiculous.
My contention is that the children and young adults are smart enough to reach their own conclusions if all sides of this argument were presented equally…and each given equal weight as a possible solution or iteration.
The atheists seem to have a heckler’s veto on the issue at the moment. That veto would come to a screaching halt if children and young adults were given a fair opportunity to hear all sides without some Carl Sagan-esque veto being sustained over the concept of debate.
February 9th, 2008 at 12:10 pmActually, I think we misunderstood one another. I don’t disagree with what you said in the least, but was augmenting it by noting the irony of the intellectual knot that the militant atheist crowd finds themselves in, scoffing at the very tradition that gave them the things they profess to be so devoted to.
I was also implying that atheism (or militant atheism, to differentiate between some of of the atheist readers here), consistently followed, does not lend itself to reasoned debate, but must rely upon external moral foundations for that. This is the school of philosophy that birthed Marxism and Fascism, so the soft tyranny of the “Carl Sagan-esque veto” is of little surprise.
February 9th, 2008 at 12:52 pm@David Marcoe
When the day and hour return that tolerance means tolerance as defined in the dictionary, and not tolerance of only non-conservative views, then I will belive that we as a society have advanced to the real progressive ideas of liberality; and have thrown the ideas of Chompsky and Zinn…where they belong…on the shitpile of History.
Debate and argument are one thing. Indoctrination is another. In the era that I grew up in, indoctrination was not possible. A Thesis without foot notes and references, was mere opinion and a failing grade.
But I digress….
I got your points. I think you got mine. This is what I expect in a free society. A teacher might say “well y’all said the same thing…but in your own words.”
My reply would have been. Yep, teach. That’s what you get when people are able to think for themselves and have been able to come to their own conclusions because you so wisely presented all sides fairly; rather than parrot some teacher just to pass a course.
February 9th, 2008 at 1:11 pmhttp://qi132.blogspot.com/
“Arguments créationnistes : 17 réfutations”
from a Belgian Mensa, relation of mine (in french I am afraid, but his links are in english) ;
well he doesn’t buy the creationism ideal, nether me (though he is more likely able to explain it than me)
from his site :
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/benton2.html
http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_idmovement.htm
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
February 9th, 2008 at 1:21 pmFrenchie:
We’re already aware of “refutations” related to Creationism.
That’s not the point of the argument. The arguments presented here are about presenting all sides of the “origins” arguments equally, with equal veracity and equal weight. By doing so, the highest traditions of liberality and education are upheld. By not doing so, only gives a heckler’s veto to one side. This is not in keeping with the traditions of true tolerance and enlightened education which were hallmarks of the education system in America for 150 years.
When all sides are given fair treatment, children and adults are given the opportunity to make a reasoned choice because they have been shown every concievable iteration availabble. Education is about learning, not indoctrination.
If one fails to learn all sides of an argument in school, then the system has failed the student and has not lived up to the tenants of true liberality as expressed by teachers and students in the past. Nor is it in keeping with the ideals of higher education as expoused by the founders of the American educational systems.
Only in a Marxist society is one side of an argument taught. In a free society all sides should be given equal weight, rather than indoctrinating students to just one view.
February 9th, 2008 at 1:52 pm“Only in a Marxist society is one side of an argument taught.” yes, so it would be in a creationism society ;
Science doesn’t belong to a society or a religion, but to passionated persons, that have an adventurous spirit
would you say that the “enlighten century” that had inspired the “founding fathers” (in a nowadays argumentation where “creationism” would have the opportunity to find ears) could have produced all these brillant minds ? I bet they would be condamned as Galileo in earlier times.
February 9th, 2008 at 2:35 pmThe unobstructed study to seek the truths of the universe should be allowed in all levels of education. Theory is not scientific evidence and should not close the door on further scrutiny. The evidence itself needs to be weighed and re-evaluated with new scientific discoveries. What was once thought irrefutable is often found surprisingly flawed.
February 9th, 2008 at 2:36 pmIf anyone has not previously heard of Ken Ham, I encourage you to check him out. He applies science to the theory of evolution and makes minced meat out of it. He’s most thought provoking and scares evolutionists out of their monkey pants.
February 9th, 2008 at 3:59 pmhow many years or decades would be need so that this ape’ll manage to make what we do ?(Ken Ham might find his “genesis” story
)
http://www.nature.com/nature/newsvideo/news.2007.317.1.mpg
In that video he beats the students !
“The researchers say the sea anemone has about 18,000 genes, while humans have about 20,000. The sea anemone’s genes are distributed across its 30 chromosomes in patterns similar to related genes on the 46 chromosomes of humans”
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0705-anemone.html
February 9th, 2008 at 5:41 pm@Frenchie:
You missed the point again. Try paying attention. I said NO ONE SIDE of the argument for “origins” should have a veto over the other side. ALL sides should be given equal weight. That includes your side. That also includes the other two theories of origins as I mentioned in my first posting.
Must of lost something in the translation huh? (Maestro please cue the Twilight Zone theme)
@nfidel
I’ve heard him on the radio…and I belive he was featured on D James Kennedy’s TV programs a few times. A Brilliant guy.
@Gary in Midwest
February 9th, 2008 at 7:47 pmAbsolutely.
Here is the opinion of an American Mensan, namely me. I am a scientist by education (chemistry) and I like to boil/reduce things down to simple statements or questions when explaining something. Incidentally the most important equations for the explanation of the natural world are primarily simple equations.
My first statement/question is simply this, take a look around at the almost infinite complexity of life on earth including the human brain. In order for all that life to exist it had to come from nonliving chemicals. That is a fact of life if you believe in evolution and the last time I checked chemicals are not alive. Simply preposterous isn’t it.
Second statement/question is this, in order for the big bang theory to have worked all the known laws of thermodynamics, chemistry and physics have to be set aside and unknown never before demonstrated or understood laws must come into play. It would take an infinite number of years to form the trillions and trillions of galaxies from the chaos that is the would be big bang. And therefore it would then take an infinite amount of energy as well since it would take an infinite number of years. Anyone who says it would take a few billion years is just making up a fairy tale number so as to make it believable.
If a person doesn’t want to serve God or live by an absolute authority, fine, that’s their choice. But don’t come up with fanciful, fair tale, comic book science theories for explaining how the world and life came into being. To believe that life came from chemicals is laughable and that planets and stars and galaxies came from a cloud of dust is not short of insanity.
Prior to the mid 19th century most scientists had no trouble believing in God. Now the arrogance of man has clouded the mind’s eye of so many.
February 9th, 2008 at 9:32 pmHere is the opinion of an American Mensan, namely me. I am a scientist by education (chemistry) and I like to boil/reduce things down to simple statements or questions when explaining something. Incidentally the most important equations for the explanation of the natural world are primarily simple equations.
My first statement/question is simply this, take a look around at the almost infinite complexity of life on earth including the human brain. In order for all that life to exist it had to come from nonliving chemicals. That is a fact of life if you believe in evolution and the last time I checked chemicals are not alive. Simply preposterous isn’t it.
Second statement/question is this, in order for the big bang theory to have worked all the known laws of thermodynamics, chemistry and physics have to be set aside and unknown never before demonstrated or understood laws must come into play. It would take an infinite number of years to form the trillions and trillions of galaxies from the chaos that is the would be big bang. And therefore it would then take an infinite amount of energy as well since it would take an infinite number of years. Anyone who says it would take a few billion years is just making up a fairy tale number so as to make it believable.
If a person doesn’t want to serve God or live by an absolute authority, fine, that’s their choice. But don’t come up with fanciful, fair tale, comic book science theories for explaining how the world and life came into being. To believe that life came from chemicals is laughable and that planets and stars and galaxies came from a cloud of dust is not short of insanity.
February 9th, 2008 at 9:32 pm@Prof Bill
I happen to agree with your thesis. Most of us are well aware of the three versions of origins. I happen to agree with yours.
However, in order to teach the fallacies of evolution and thereby give students the tools to shoot it down, I belive that all theories of “origins” should be taught equally.
To me, presenting all the different teachings on origins is the only way to be fair to the students. And then they would be free to make up their own minds on the subject.
Imagine having a course divided by semesters that featured a rabid evolutionist, a rabid Theistic evolutioniost, and a rabid Special Creationist…all being given equal access, and equal time to teach their views.
That’s what made school interesting 40 years ago. It’s what is wrong with education today. No one should be allowed a veto in education. School should be about learning, not indoctrination.
If this were the case, kids would have the tools that they need to become the critical thinkers that they are not.
And the evolutionists would have to present scientific evidence to support their positions instead of just teaching words out of a book…or expressing mere opinion on the matter.
Same with Creationists. What is the evidence. Poke holes in the evolutionary thesis of Darwin…by all means, but back it up with science.
Ah man, it would be a beautiful thing to see. Even I would be willing to take such a science class and I freaking hate science.
February 9th, 2008 at 10:41 pmIn the beginning, God created the Big Bang.
February 9th, 2008 at 11:06 pm“Darwin was a Christian. He studied theology at Cambridge. His theory of natural selection date of 1838 and was built on the basis of elements collected during the voyage of the Beagle, from 1831 to 1836. Darwin did become agnostic in 1851, following the death of his daughter Annie”
I see that “creationism” is operating much of a “conviction” that there is a “great ordinator”, thus a theory, and that scientists of independant mind operate with logical facts, implying that new discoveries could contradict the previous ones ;
see the Gmo, that is a “creationist” design, that the humans operated.
well, I can’t see that “theoricians” can all agree, they employ their ego-energy to demonstrate that they are right, idem in philosophical domains.
yeah, John, I had once the nightmare vision of the big bang
yes, the students must be aware of the both sides, sceptiscism should be their leit-motiv on any point of view that has to go through their prism
February 10th, 2008 at 4:34 amFranchie, yea, but that was just the Eiffel Tower.
February 10th, 2008 at 6:20 amJohn your too realistic pessimist
my-be the Effel tower will be aspired by magnetic winds
February 10th, 2008 at 6:37 amCreationism is silly.
I don’t see why a the majority of Christians can’t interpret genesis any other way then literally. There’s really no basis to Creationism, I’m kinda disappointed to see it mentioned favorably here. I thought we were a tad smarter then that.
February 10th, 2008 at 9:10 amFrenchie:
That’s right Darwin had a Divinity degree and on his way back from the university met a geologist who influenced his thinking.
His wife on the other hand was a Christian, who kept after Darwin all of his life to not turn his back on Christianity.
On his death bed, he told his wife that he was wrong about origins. Whether or not he went back to his religion or not…no one is sure.
@ John Cunningham
“In the beginning, God created the Big Bang.” So you are a Theistic evolution proponent?
February 10th, 2008 at 9:11 amHow we got here isn’t really important and will probably never be agreed upon. All that really matters is that we here.
February 10th, 2008 at 9:18 amDan, the Hubble telescope shows us universes and galaxies billions and billions of years older than the billions of years old we are.
February 10th, 2008 at 9:26 am@Kyrceck
Creationists understand that evolutionists when faced with the facts of science as Prof Bill so ably disclosed, have to have as much faith in their theory as a Creationist has in Genesis.
Creationists realize that to deny the Genesis account of origins is to deny that the word of God is true. Let God be true and every man a liar…etc…When I say Creationists I mean Special Creationists, not Theistic Evolutionists.
Either the Word of God is true (And I ain’t talking about Jihadis or their damed moon-god or their false prophet here)…or it isn’t. We believe that it is since the Pentateuch(sp) was dictated by the only eyewitness to Creation…we take that eyewitness account as being factual.
Whether people believe it or not is a matter of faith.
But so is Darwin…who’s basic precepts, are easily shot down by natural science as explained by Prof Bill.
Love to see a real debate happen in a school. And I don’t mean one side getting short shrift either. I mean a real robust debate where the students themselves after hearing all sides have to divide into three groups and defend the opposite view from their own as one would defend a client in court.
Now that’s the way to learn and defend a position on a issue. That’s an environment where educational indoctrination would die of its own weight and critical thinking would thrive and be encouraged.
By all means, let students have an opinion. But show them all sides and treat all sides with equal equanimity.
Creationism is silly? You just validated my points.
February 10th, 2008 at 9:36 am@John Cunningham:
And what do you use as a basis to date the universe John? How do you know with certitude that the universe is that old? Has someone gone out to one of those stars and carbon dated it? Or did he/she use radiometrics on said star?
February 10th, 2008 at 10:19 amOK, Dan, sorry to say, you’re off the rails. They even said that all those suns and planets weren’t flat.
February 10th, 2008 at 3:02 pmhttp://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=5787&page=R1
john
February 10th, 2008 at 4:01 pm@John Cunningham
I’m off the rails? Why? Because I asked a good question or because you can’t prove your statement?
February 10th, 2008 at 5:04 pmJust as I thought. The vast majority of evolutionists don’t even know the science. They assume that because it is accepted by the mainstraem, it is somehow a fact. What did Marx say…teach a lie long enough and eventually people will believe it?
I’m not interested in links. I can defend my own arguments without links. I’ve studied each of the origins theories in depth, to satisfy my own curiosity.
But saying I’m off the rails on the issue is not what I call a debate. Prove your points evolutionists, with your own knowledge and in your own words. If you can. Let’s hear your science as you yourself understand it. Back it up with your so-called facts and I’ll shoot holes in arguments.
Otherwise, I’m left with the impression that you don’t know shit about it.
Let the games begin again.
February 10th, 2008 at 5:16 pmHere’s my problem with evolution…go ahaed and comment there John if you can.
1. Irreducible complexity - It was necessary for trillions of simultaneous mutations to occur just to achieve a cahnge in a single system We know from cancer patients that mutations destroy a host. Nature itself rejects all mutations? So how is this possible?
2. Contradiction of the first law of thermodynamics and general relativity - The first law indicates that matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed. But general relativity along with supporting observations indicates that there was clearly a beginning of everything. They can’t be reconciled without the intervention of the superntural IMHO.
3/ Lack of any proven mechanism for transmission from lower life forms to higher life forms. Theories of positive mutational change have been shown to be statistically impossible.
Moreover, attemping to cross-breed one family of species (say an ape) with another species (say a human) will at best yield a still born fetus in the lab.
Louis Leaky, Heinkle’s embryos, Judy or Julie the missing link have all turned out to be frauds.
The fossil record - it dooesn’t support evolution. Case in point: There is a large above ground coal deposit in the midwest. In some places it is 300 feet thick. Why is that deposit above ground instaed of underground and why is there no clay on it? It does not match up with the Darwinian charts that I’ve seen.
And why is it that diamonds have been found in Africa that have been previously exposed to sunlight? I thought that diamonds weren’t suppose to have ever been exposed to sunlight since they are formed underground?
And where is your missing link? Matching up a bone or two taken from one place or the other to some model of the missing link, neither correctly matches up the bones or proves that those bones belong to any particular homo sapiens.
Of course a forensic cross-section of bones can always tell if the bones are animal or human. But why disturb the myth eh?
Perhaps John would like to discuss the issue of chirality?
February 10th, 2008 at 6:42 pmFranchie, merci, very beaucoup!
February 10th, 2008 at 9:39 pmjohn,
your my favorite neerdanthal warrior,bonus :
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1035111282729232040&hl=en
“evolutionally” speaking, did the neardanthals interbreed with the cro-magnons ?
as a cromagnon I suspect that I have neerdanthalien DNA in the brain too
Dan, there are many museums in the world’s wide that have witnesses of “evolution” fossils
as far as diamonds are concerned, you can recreate them in a laboratory, it’s a question of high and lengh of temperature
as far as witnesses of remains in a given place, bizarre that in center of France, we have many sea shells, insects, small fishes, pieces of exotic vegetals… that are “prisonners” in stones, stratified clays and sands ; the sea was there ; dunno how many millenariums or million years ago though ; but naturally none of the apparented human (because of the sea)
so, I am not trying to convice you more (I am not a specialist, neither you are, au-secours Sully
) ;
we can “talk” about these facts without fighting each others
February 11th, 2008 at 3:58 amFranchie, loved the cartoon.
I’m three-fourth Irish and one-fourth Polish, total knuckle dragger.
February 11th, 2008 at 7:32 amTHE THEORY OF EVOLUTION NEEDS A WHOLE REVISION.
I think that today almost the whole world could admit this diagnosis.
February 14th, 2008 at 3:02 pmIf you say that evolution is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology, and that it is supported in multiple forms of scientific evidence, I must agree. But I have to say that the most fundamental thing is to avoid the present confusion between “the fact of evolution” and “the theory of natural selection”.
Today increases the number of American School Board’s resolutions urging the wording be changed to allow for balanced, objective and intellectually open instruction in regard to evolution, teaching the scientific strengths and weaknesses of this theory, rather than teaching it as dogmatic fact. I agree as well, because a true scientist will always allow any theory to be undermined by further scientific findings.
Dan has said: “Learn from the great scientists of the past. Did they follow one way of thinking on a problem? No. They looked at all sides of a problem and all possible iterations and developed their own well-reasoned solutions”.
Following that same idea I have developed my own well-reasoned solutions. As a conclusion, I affirm that Darwin’s theory of evolution is at a very critical point. Thus, I’m one of the scientists who think that natural selection is an inadequate theory to explain the emergence and the evolution of the living beings.
If you are interested on the foundations of a new theory of evolution and ready to rethink some laws of physics and of biology, you are invited to visit the blog:
http://www.cosmosandgaia.blogspot.com (and the Spanish web page linked to it)
There you can find some excerpts from the book “Cosmos y Gea. Fundamentos de una nueva teoría de la evolución” (Cosmos and Gaia. Foundations of a new theory of evolution). This book is not yet translated into English, but many people already have found it as an essential scientific issue, far beyond of the sterile and ideological controversy between Darwinism and creationism.