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Thursday, August 28, 2014

The function of IDiots

There aren't very many big questions left to answer. Most ot the great debates have been settled and we're now in a mopping up situation.

One of the few remaining questions concerns the function of IDiots. The Intelligent Design Creationist Movement has been a spectacular failure. The Wedge Document is a joke. They've failed to get creationism into American schools. People are abandoning Christianity. Their books have all been trashed by critics.

One wonders why they're still around. They must be thinking the same thing because David Klinghoffer has put up a recent post on this very issue [You're Welcome: Darwinists Should Thank Us for Quality Control, Fact-Checking]. It turns out that the function of IDiots is to keep real scientists honest by finding flaws in their reasoning and errors of fact.
Casey [Luskin] points out that in any marketplace—whether vendors are promoting consumer products or ideas about evolution—competition improves the products and the service. The absence of competition almost always results in shoddy products and poor consumer service, as anyone who has visited a socialist country can tell you. Darwin advocates should be thanking us.

Of course the flipside to all this is that for every orthodox evolutionist who is made more judicious and truthful in what he argues, there's probably another who prevaricates about the meaning of scientific data, because "What will the creationists say?"

Still, on the whole, they and everyone else who cares about getting at the truth in science ought to be glad we're here.
Who knew?


70 comments :

Anonymous said...

that is such horse shit. Biologists who look at any of their articles for even only 2 seconds find a myriad of errors

Petrushka said...

As custodian of Paley's Natural Theology, they are a living embodiment of a era in the history of science.

Reenactors.

Anonymous said...

Larry wrote:

"There aren't very many big questions left to answer. Most ot the great debates have been settled and we're now in a mopping up situation..."

At first I said to myself: "Really...'??? Then: "Larry's been drinking..." And then I noticed labels: Humor, Rationalism v Superstition...

Nice try Larry!!! ;-)

Joe Felsenstein said...

If the ID web sites are centers for clear-headed logical thinking, how come the regulars there never seem to debate whether the Earth is young or old? At a site like Uncommon Descent. roughly half of the regulars believe the one, half the other, so they ought to be able to have a great discussion, with all those clear-headed thinkers around.

Beau Stoddard said...

"There aren't very many big questions left to answer. Most ot the great debates have been settled and we're now in a mopping up situation."

So according to the logic of Professor Moran scientists won't be of use in the near future? With all the heavy lifting being done you've opened a giant market for custodians? I have to run, I need to withdraw my children science class. I'll make sure to refer their advisors to your blog. I hope all the mops aren't sold out. How will we eat?

judmarc said...

Doesn't matter *when* God did it, Joe, so long as he did it (I would think is the reason you don't find more discussion along the lines you mention).

The whole truth said...

Or at least it doesn't matter yet. To achieve dominion over the Earth the IDiot-creationists will welcome, accept, recruit, or tolerate pretty much anyone as long as they push the same so-called 'God' or even some other so-called 'Gods' (big tent). However, if dominion over the Earth (or at least over a country such as the USA) were achieved, then the IDCs would not only argue vehemently among themselves about yec vs. oec and any other differences in their religious beliefs but they would likely wage war against each other.

The whole truth said...

Klinghoffer, Luskin, and other discotute cowards post their self-righteous crap on a site (ENV) where no comments are allowed. No questions, no disagreements, no fact checking, no quality control, and no getting at the truth in science by the "competition" can happen on their Nazi-esque marketplace (ENV).

Behe calls his recent posts at ENV a "discussion" with Larry Moran, but Behe didn't post even one comment and discuss anything here at Sandwalk, and of course Larry can't comment at ENV.

So, who fears whom?

Ted said...

Doesn't matter *when* God did it, Joe, so long as he did it (I would think is the reason you don't find more discussion along the lines you mention).
Seriously? What happened to the claim that ID wasn't about religion but rather about sober scientific objections to natural selection? And the age of the earth matters very much to the question of evolution, if the earth is less than, say, 1 million years old, there wouldn't be enough time for evolution. Hence all arguments about whether evolution could work would become completely pointless.

Steve said...

Moran, you are starting to sound like Lavrov,

ID waxing, Moran whining.

Steve said...

Whole truth doesn't get to cuss out Behe. Boohoo.

Because that is the first and only thing you would be interested in if Behe crossed the Rubicon.

No, he has communicated perfectly well using cyber ear cans and string;

... just out of spitball range.

Dammit all, bit truth had a luger all lathered up for the Behe.

Steve said...

See Ted, you didn't even notice your subliminal slippo.

For your side, its all about how evolution 'could' work. Oh, the knots you(pl) are tying yourselves into to make it all work.

....a behemoth crushed by the weight of its own hedge bets.

steve oberski said...

To answer your question, IDiots are a very expensive and inefficient way of sequestering carbon.

On the bright side, in a few hundred million years or so, their futile and meaningless lives will finally bear fruit as they come back as oil slicks in which one can observe the virgin mary or her bastard, out of wedlock son.

judmarc said...

Seriously? What happened to the claim that ID wasn't about religion but rather about sober scientific objections to natural selection?

Not about religion? As a wise man once said - seriously?

Robert Byers said...

Mr Felsenstein
These are biological matters and geology is very secobdary,
However you are right about geology being essential to THIS biological subject.
Evolutionist and ID both can not assert or attack evolution without geological presumptions of deposition events segregated by long periods of time.
Without their geology conclusions there is not only lacking 75% of evidence evolution uses but a different geological conclusion , and so the fossils story, would ruin evolution.
They need time .
This would be a good subject for you to bring up on Panda's thumb.
Then allow creationists, like me, to participate and proper investigation of these matters will get us closer to the truth.

Robert Byers said...

Settled?? Mopping up??
As the still unmopped I would remind, relative to another thread, when the Americans said , in 1812, Canada would be conquered by a mere matter of marching. or mopping up in other words.
Remember george bush saying iraq was battle won just before the real battle had begun? Just kidding here eh!
Creationism in both iD and YEC is going so powerfully these days its an embarrassment of riches.
in fact yEC must assert itself or iD will take the glory of the kill.
iD has famously taken on the issue of natures evidence for god and natures lack of evidence for evolution and is , with not that many people, a threat so bad they must censor and severally CONTROL iD thinkers.
Your discussions with Behe show how the idea of mutations so easily presumed to create our biology is greatly questioned by the public.
Irreducible complexity is behind Behe's stuff.
Whether his examples are right or wrong is a minor matter. the bigger matter is that mutations are not able to produce complexity as needed.
if true then Behe is on the trail in our time.

Piotr Gąsiorowski said...

One thing is for sure: they will not figure out what "Darwinist" means until their demise.

Piotr Gąsiorowski said...

Whenever the topic is brought up at UD, Joe G says that the age of the Earth can't be determined since we don't know how the Earth was formed (and we can't know how it was formed, 'cuz we wasn't there). I can't recall any disagreement with that from UD regulars.

Pedro A B Pereira said...

Then allow creationists, like me, to participate and proper investigation of these matters will get us closer to the truth.

You have already been participating at Panda's for years, and there's plenty of geology-related articles there. No one ever kicked you out of there.

AllanMiller said...

Must ... not .... quotemine ... nnnnnghhhh .... ah, the hell with it!

"Creationism in both iD and YEC is going so powerfully these days its an embarrassment" RB, 29/8/2014.

Pedro A B Pereira said...

There aren't very many big questions left to answer. Most ot the great debates have been settled and we're now in a mopping up situation.

I have to say that I disagree with this statement. As Gould once said "know the history of your own field well". I'd say "know the history of your own field and of Science in general well". It has been a very common statement throughout the history of Science to claim that one "lives in special times". Darwin's Origin of Species gave many in the field the sensation that most important questions were done with and one just needed to "mopp up" the details, like the actual mechanisms of variation and heredity. The architects of the Modern Synthesis also thought ToE was done for and there was just mopping up to do. Now we know that was not the case at all, but here we are again thinking that this time it's the real thing and we can just tidy up the details.

My point is that there isn't a single science in which we can say for certain that the most important aspects are worked out and we just need to mopp up and close a few gaps, as one closes a genome. We have no good reason to make such a statement.

The funny thing is, this actually goes *against* ID arguments. IF for some twist of fate the ToE was found to be insufficient to explain all aspects of evolution mechanisms, then it would mean that ToE would need to be expanded, modified, or droped entirely for something new that explained it better, the same way that Relativity contains Newtonian mechanics but has much more explanatory power. One of the funny things about ID is that even though they have some philosophers among them, those philosophers never came up with ANY good reason why ToE should be treated any different from any other scientific theory, and why some imaginary problems with the theory would necessarily imply that a god-of-the-gaps (non)argument would be the answer. These inepts are the same kind of people that thought that angels stabilized the orbits of planets when Newton was incapable of showing orbital stability. They are the same kind of people that thought, when Mercury was shown to not follow the rules of Newtonian mechanics, that there was angels afteral. And then Relativity came and the gaps went away. Why excately would ToE be any different IF it was shown to be insufficient as it stands? Modern ToE is vastly different from Darwin's day. Why do these idiots think that it either works perfectly well or god will necessarily fill the gaps? Do they also think that the gaps in chemical mechanisms are filled with gods? That our lack of detailed knowledge on the Earth's core means there is a god at the center of the earth? That the inadequacy of Relativity to deal with singularities means there's a god in each black hole's core? The stupidity is mindblowing.

Larry Moran said...

I never said that ALL of the issues were settled. I gave you two examples of ongoing "great debates." One of them concerned rolls of toilet paper and the other was about IDiots. Those were clues.

judmarc said...

Crossing the Rubicon, cyber ear cans, string, spitballs, lugers - I am sure there is some universe where these are related ideas that could go together in a thematic paragraph.

The plague of incoherence - you too can help. Please give generously.

Pedro A B Pereira said...

Heh.

Pedro A B Pereira said...

So... we are only animals after all


Took you all this time to realize that?

judmarc said...

So... we are only animals after all... How do you like that Larry...?

Since Larry has understood this forever, I'm sure he likes it just fine. But since it happens to be the fact, the better question appears to be how do you like it?

Mikkel Rumraket Rasmussen said...

Kingdom: Animalia

Fuck, turns out you're right. The horror...

Anonymous said...

It always amazes me how you...and other people for that matter... always know what Larry likes, thinks, understands, or what he would say...

I have said it before... I would pay a great deal of money to have a gift like that... lol

judmarc said...

If you think it would bother Dr. Moran that we are "only" animals, you must not have bothered to do much reading/understanding of his blog, for all your posting here. Do you think he would disagree that humans are part of the animal kingdom? If so, then I have to ask what you understand to be meant by the term "common descent."

Petrushka said...

And diamonds are just carbon.

Petrushka said...

It shows the level of understanding of biology that some could just be finding out that there was no first human. It's implicit in the concept of common descent.

colnago80 said...

Actually, Newton himself thought that planetary stability would be maintained by the intervention of god every so often. Laplace showed that we had no need of such a hypothesis.

Larry Moran said...

@Quest

I watched the video a few days ago. It was shocking. Turns out we aren't plants after all. Time to revise the textbook.

Who knew?

Anonymous said...

Thank Darwin... or who knows who...? :-)

Anonymous said...

@Larry

BTW: I was shocked by the video too... I just can't comprehend how you and other believers of evolution do it.....I mean ....Larry.... coz I would have never guessed what the "movie" was all about at if 999 out of 1000 frames were missing from it.... I guess I don't have that kind of imagination... or faith...
I have a buddy movie-director... Don't tell anyone... he is into really spooky films... I'm going to ask him to watch a movie of your choice and see if he can make any sense of it.... It is hard but it can be done.... I know it for a fact... gentleman and the ladies of course ...

Bilbo said...

Professor Moran: There aren't very many big questions left to answer. Most ot the great debates have been settled and we're now in a mopping up situation.

Are you speaking of great debates in biology, such as how life originated, how phyla originated, and how multi-protein complexes originated?

Or did you have broader questions in mind, such as why is there something instead of nothing, why are there laws of nature, why are they apparently fine-tuned for life as we know it, how do we solve the mind/body problem, and are moral values objective?

Since you're only a biochemist, I don't expect you to have answers to the second set of questions. But since you have claimed that the big questions have been answered, I expect you to provide us with the answers to the big questions in biology. Or withdraw your claim.

Unknown said...

But it is interesting that Robert has been banned from commenting on UD.

Anonymous said...

Do you have a problem with "disadvantaged" people being made fun off...?

Steve said...

Ah, I see judmarc. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" won't cut it with you.

A bit of sciency sounding words would pass the smell test, is that it?


Steve said...

See Larry, that's why you and your cohorts aren't getting anywhere. F#$%, you know it all.

Nothing left to discover, huh?

Pity your ignorance.

ID's just getting started. You know it. The Behe is pushin' your buttons big time and YOU dont like it.

Crank it up people, Larry's on the warpath.

Steve said...

Common on Bilbo, Larry defenses have been depleted since the bitch-slapping at the hands of The Behe.

He needs time to reload.

Hmm, or maybe asserting all has been settled is in fact a fresh salvo from what could just be a new offensive capability.

Hard to tell, really. Let's wait a bit so we can collect relevant data on the destruction wrought by this new space(y)-based hyperbollary system Larry's test-driving.

MSEE said...

NOW that's rich. A Darwinist comes out and says it all - life and lives are meaningless, futile, not that we didn't suspect it. It's the obvious take away from any debate involving desperate materialists. Hey guys don't wake up. Your collective, daily obsession with ID is so entertaining, and doesn't undermine your image one whit, no sir. Please keep it up.

Diogenes said...

Words with a certain sound abd therefore have a smell?

Millions suffer from mixed metaphor disorder. Please, think of the children. All donations are tax deductible.

MSEE said...

"those philosophers never came up with ANY good reason why ToE should be treated any different from any other scientific theory, " So if you don't mind yours truly pointing out few couple of things --> (1) No other 'scientific theory' is really a cult with a 19th century figurehead, forever to be absolutely revered. (2) No other 'scientific theory' has a figurehead that was not a scientist. (3) No other scientific theory is so obviously non-falsifiable. Face the music guys, the average person is now becoming aware of the ubiquitous gaps in the fossil record, a massive failure for a theory that just soldiers on. And the average Joe is slowly becoming aware of other failed predictions like "junk DNA", a prediction that was correctly countered in the ID literature more than a decade ago. Sorry guys, the literature is out there, a spectacular success for ID and ENCODE. And a massive failure for a theory that just soldiers on, non-falsifiable as it is.

steve oberski said...

I couldn't agree more.

It's far better to obsess on a special relationship with an invisible friend who has made me the humble but still entirely deserving centre of the universe and to eschew the here and now for the bliss of an eternal rave party than to fully live the only life than we demonstratively possess.

steve oberski said...

Let's cut Robert some slack here, he has enough trouble remembering what he wrote at the beginning of a post by the time he reaches the end, you surely can't expect him to remember what he wrote almost an entire day ago.

Faizal Ali said...

But ID has nothing to do with religion. Right, MSEE?

Faizal Ali said...

As a fellow Torontonian, I suspect Larry will agree that this is another of the unanswered questions of the universe:

How is this possible: Rob Ford gaining ground in new poll ?

Faizal Ali said...

So what do you wish to debate, Quest?

MSEE said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
MSEE said...

Well lutesuite, get this. In the ID literature with which you guys are NOT obsessed and don't read, there is nothing about religion, you just seem to think it there, for some reason. But read my last post - you guys live in your own meaningless universe, products of stupid nature which stupidly created "junk DNA" and stupidly created itself. Out of stupidity in case you missed that. Now no one is trying to hide the likelihood that the successful predictions of ID makes belief in something independent of nature much easier. Again, NO ONE IS HIDING this.

Delete

MSEE said...

Oberski -- nice caricature. Now if you are really that happy about the coming and total personal annihilation of your being, go out and celebrate your life's futility with your own party, because this is a crucial aspect of your philosophy, amateur as it may or may not be. Don't get me wrong, I'm serious. How could crucial aspects of one's existence not be celebrated including its temporality? Or how about this, instead start a 50 session exploration with psilocybe cubensis, at night, in the woods, buried in a sleeping bag, and eventually find out if your mental state as currently configured is up to telling everyone including school children what does and doesn't exist. Tip: read Grof's "Realms Of The Human Unconscious" first.

steve oberski said...

As another fellow Torontonian, I suspect that in the Venn diagram of creationist IDiots and the "Ford Nation", there is a a large degree of intersection.

steve oberski said...

With respect to "telling everyone including school children what does and doesn't exist", I defer to the expertise of the religious in this area, though one wonders how they have time to tell them anything after they are done raping them, murdering them and burying the bodies in septic fields.

It would appear that other than as a mechanism for controlling the bodies of women, the religious have very little interest in the well being of children,

And not to worry, I don't get you wrong, I have a very good understanding of exactly where you are coming from, and it's not pretty.

MSEE said...

"where you are coming from, and it's not pretty" See this is what you guys always do in the end. You find yourself not able to come back with gentlemanly response, or reasoned debate, and so we get from you all kinds of mayhem and personal attack. All in the name of 'science'. Why the extreme emotion? Postulate: You show your hand - don't like being in the corner or in an extreme minority philosophical stance as history has shown and always will. I'm betting you didn't even consider looking at a review of the book I recommended. Why not? I did it for you in a sincere offering of expansion of you philosophical boundaries. It was written by an M.D. researcher from Czechoslavakia, 17 years research with a well known and powerful psychological tool.

The whole truth said...

Hey MSEE, where is the "gentlemanly response" and the "reasoned debate" in your comments?

And what is this supposed to mean:

"Or how about this, instead start a 50 session exploration with psilocybe cubensis, at night, in the woods, buried in a sleeping bag, and eventually find out if your mental state as currently configured is up to telling everyone including school children what does and doesn't exist."?

Have you been eating psychedelic mushrooms, at night, in the woods, buried in a sleeping bag, 50 times, to 'reconfigure' your mental state? Tell us more about your beliefs and mental state.

AllanMiller said...

For Christ's sake NO_ONE tell my kids, but the paper has GOT to be hung as in A. My missus does it completely at random, and I always switch it round. The kids are aware there is Something Undisclosed that bugs me. I have revealed this in papers I hope will discovered on my demise, but no way will I tell them while alive. I know how those little bastards' minds work! ;)

steve oberski said...

Larry, speaking in defence of rolls of toilet paper, I find the comparison to IDiots to be quite invidious.

Barbara said...

B. Always hang the paper as B. Not only is the paper printed so it will look better that way, but when it's hung as in A and it gets hung up and won't fall on its own, I can't find the end to get it started again! Let the world standardize this thing -- as B.

Unknown said...

Steve, I don't think that it is fair to female dogs to call Behe a bitch.

Unknown said...

MSEE: "NOW that's rich. A Darwinist comes out and says it all - life and lives are meaningless"

You are absolutely correct. Life, itself, has absolutely no meaning as the religious perceive it. Why does that scare you so much? What is the meaning of a rock? Of carbon monoxide? Of an electron? Of a super nova?

The big difference that I see between you and most other commenters here (Robert, Steve and Quest excepted) is that we are capable of developing meaning to our life's without relying on a church to tell us what it must be.

adey said...

NO, NO, Toilet rolls have been hung as A for 4.5billion years! Only heretics who believe in 6000years hang it as B.

When you find a multi-ply in the Cambrian then I will follow your way.

Read "On the Origin of Toilet Rolls" by Chuck Dorwin and learn.

AllanMiller said...

Barbara - I would dub A the 'Gentlemen's Way'. It enables a single sheet to be torn off with one hand, deftly stopping the roll from spinning with the back of the same hand. As a gentleman, I will leave to the imagination the requirement for such a manoeuvre, but B just results in a spinning issue, excess paper requiring re-spooling, and multi tasking for a hand already occupied with targetting issues.

AllanMiller said...

Although psychedelics can cause users to experience a transcendent state, there's no doubt that it's a fundamentally physical phenomenon. A chemical messes with your neurotransmitters, heightening your appreciation of colour and beauty (or making you terrified, if you get it wrong). If one is susceptible to spiritual notions, one can readily interpret it as getting in touch with the Order of the Universe. But if one considers experience to be a physical phenomenon, getting mushed - experiencing altered perceptions by chemical means - is unlikely to change that view.

Barbara said...

Allan -- If you are having trouble with too much toilet paper spooling off the roll, just compress the roll a bit so the hole in the center is oval or football shaped (American football shaped). And go with the clearly superior B.

Nullifidian said...

For your side, its all about how evolution 'could' work.

No, that's what it's about for the ID crowd (especially Behe and Dembski), whose work Ted was characterizing. Can you not read even the simplest sentences correctly?

Nullifidian said...

MSEE:
So if you don't mind yours truly pointing out few couple of things --> (1) No other 'scientific theory' is really a cult with a 19th century figurehead, forever to be absolutely revered.

That's complete nonsense, but it is interesting to see how frequently IDiots like to tell us what we think about Darwin, often getting really upset with us when we disagree. It's a strange kind of "reverence" where the great man's works mostly go unread because what was of scientific value in them is better transmitted in textbooks than directly mined from the source. I read On the Origin of Species for the first time only a few years ago out of purely antiquarian interest, for the same reason I read the Principia, The Starry Messenger, and Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems before it. I guess that means I must reverence Newton and Galileo too.

(2) No other 'scientific theory' has a figurehead that was not a scientist.

More horseshit. Darwin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, awarded with that institution's Royal Medal (1853) and Copley Medal (1864), and the Geological Society of London's Wollaston Medal in the banner year of 1859. He published both journal articles and scientific monographs, including a landmark study on barnacles that is still useful today. Creationists who claim that Darwin wasn't a scientist usually do so on the anachronistic basis that Darwin didn't have a science degree, even though neither Cambridge nor Oxford offered such degrees at the time, despite turning out plenty of scientists. Unfortunately for creationists, who are generally authoritarian, real scientists care more about what your facts are and how well you can support them than whether you've got a little badge that says you're a for-real scientist. It's the creationists who obsess over credentials, having nothing else going for them, which explains why so many of them trot out their irrelevant and/or diploma mill doctorates.

(3) No other scientific theory is so obviously non-falsifiable.

Yet more nonsense. There is a difference between being unfalsifiable and not yet being falsified. Creationists make this objection because they don't like it when all their half-baked, irrelevant objections to evolutionary theory fail to topple it. But instead of blaming themselves for trying to argue with reality, they double-down and claim that evolutionary biology is at fault for not collapsing like a house of cards in a high wind at the first cry of "WHY ARE THERE STILL MONKEEEEEYYYS?!?!". It is necessary to understand what evolution is and what the theory predicts before trying to falsify it. Creationists skip this step.

Nullifidian said...

MSEE, continued:

Face the music guys, the average person is now becoming aware of the ubiquitous gaps in the fossil record, a massive failure for a theory that just soldiers on.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there are "ubiquitous gaps in the fossil record", even though you don't bother to specify what these alleged gaps are. So what? What part of evolutionary theory requires that transitional fossils exist in the present? Sure, it would be nice to have more fossils than we do (although we already have so many that experienced preparators can't always be found, leading to some remarkable specimens such as Pederpes finneyae being overlooked for decades), but there is no rule that there must be a single transitional fossil found. To assert otherwise would be to say that we could falsify any scientific theory merely by failing to look for the supporting evidence! All evolutionary biology can be held to predict is that if a transitional fossil is found, it should have certain anatomical characteristics intermediate between or a mosaic of those of two taxa. And not only does it meet that challenge, it does it brilliantly with examples such as Sphecomyrma freyi, Tiktaalik roseae, and Morganucodon watsoni and thousands of others. Read Donald Prothero's Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters for not only more detail on the fossil record, but also an explanation of what paleontologists look at when making the determination and how they know it.

And the average Joe is slowly becoming aware of other failed predictions like "junk DNA", a prediction that was correctly countered in the ID literature more than a decade ago.

LMAO! Oh dear, you have chosen the wrong place to make that kind of claim.

That "countering" of junk DNA was preceded by adaptationists making almost identical arguments (to the extent IDists understand junk DNA well enough to make arguments, which is not often) over 40 years ago. If junk DNA is refuted, then the only thing that is established is that the adaptationists were right, not that evolution is wrong. And if you think the ENCODE project gives any significant empirical support to the view that the existence of junk DNA has been disproven, then let me disabuse you. You can search for ENCODE on this very blog and find dozens of pages of refutations. That's why I'm so amused by your trying on this argument here.

But since "no junk DNA" is supposedly a "spectacular success for ID", I have just one question: why? What, specifically, does ID predict about junk DNA beyond the 'fact' that there won't be any and what is the reasoning behind it?

Larry Moran said...

Nullifidian writes,

I read "On the Origin of Species" for the first time only a few years ago out of purely antiquarian interest, ...

Me too. I also read the Bible and other great works of fiction and mythology.

Darwin's book was excellent and it still contains lots of truths and insights.

The Bible? ... Not so much.

colnago80 said...

Re Nullifidian

More horseshit. Darwin was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, awarded with that institution's Royal Medal (1853) and Copley Medal (1864), and the Geological Society of London's Wollaston Medal in the banner year of 1859. He published both journal articles and scientific monographs, including a landmark study on barnacles that is still useful today. Creationists who claim that Darwin wasn't a scientist usually do so on the anachronistic basis that Darwin didn't have a science degree, even though neither Cambridge nor Oxford offered such degrees at the time, despite turning out plenty of scientists.

Michael Faraday never went to college and hardly attended school at all. Didn't stop him from making landmark contributions to the theory of electromagnetism. In fact, if he had had a better mathematical background, Maxwell's Equations would have ended up being called Faraday's Equations.