Florabama speaks

I've been trying to argue a few points on the creationist blogs but I have to admit that I'm not making any progress at all. Even the simplest, most obvious, points are vigorously contested by the ID crowd over there.

My latest attempt was on the post, Suzan Mazur’s Paradigm Shifters is now available from Amazon, where I tried to explain that Denyse O'Leary's version of Darwinism is not the best description of evolutionary theory and that many of Suzan Mazur's "Paradigm Shifters" have missed the revolution that occurred in the late 1960s.

Didn't work.

Now someone named "Florabama" has posted a comment that illustrates the problem we're up against. I thought I'd share it with Sandwalk readers. It may not be possible to teach such a person anything about science.

Professor Moran, I thank you for coming over here and revealing the vacuousness of your argument and personal character — both — in just a few posts. To do both so quickly says a lot. You are efficient if not very thoughtful nor creative (Donald Trump is much better at insults and he’s not very good).

This is a fascinating time to be alive. Each and every pillar of “Darwinism” (no doubt the most influential ideology in the last 150 years) has been knocked out from under it leaving it and you Professor, hanging, in der luft, and arguing with the scientific consensus on things like junk DNA and the inability of random mechanisms to create super complex biological systems while you and your colleagues scramble to find alternatives to the long dead Darwinistic mechanisms which were nothing but just so stories all along.

What’s so fascinating to me is that it has been science itself that has left your position so bankrupt. No one even argues that Neo-Darwinism is still a viable position any longer.

From the front page of The Third Way of Evolution:

“The commonly accepted alternative [to ID] is Neo-Darwinism, which is clearly naturalistic science but ignores much contemporary molecular evidence and invokes a set of unsupported assumptions about the accidental nature of hereditary variation.”

I know, I know. Before you say it. You have all the answers, NOW. Neutral Theory and random genetic drift. We got it. But, the point is that your own colleagues say that “Darwinism” (their word not mine) “ignored contemporary evidence” and made “naturalistic assumptions” hence you must move on down the road and find new alternatives now that the “contemporary molecular evidence,” is available Better get moving before Mazur writes ANOTHER book. (Y’all sure don’t like her very much but she’s neither a creationist nor an ID proponent — just the messenger that keeps telling us about the fractured state of evolutionary thinking). Oh well!

Anyway, wasn’t that what your ID critics said all along? That you IGNORED evidence to the contrary? Well, I’m sure ignoring evidence is just a thing of the past, right? But here you sit, arguing with Encode, and in the meantime the DarwiNazi Mafia enforces a strict ban on disseminating anything other than the long dead, old Darwinism to high school students least the thinkers among them begin to question the narrative. Can’t have questions, can we? Can’t reveal the cracks in the dam.

Unfortunately for you, but fortunately for them, we now live in the information age. The dam has broken and try as you might to enforce party allegiance, the information is there for the taking and each and every time you enforce censorship, you encourage thinkers to look behind the curtain.”Just what are they hiding?” A bit of catch 22 for you, isn’t it?

This is why you have lost. Science has nibbled away at your position until there’s nothing left and you have been forced to “evolve.” You are left just exactly where you were before — appealing to Neutral Theory and random genetic drift — instead of natural selection and random mutations — without ever demonstrating how any of these processes can build super complex machines. In loving memory of the late Yogi Berra, this is “deja vu all over again.” Meanwhile in the lab, beyond the power of just so stories, Summers et al is beginning to define the edge of evolution, and not to put too fine a point on it, it just ain’t all that.

Science continues to march forward leaving you and your bankrupt ideology behind. That must be very scary for you seeing that you have devoted your life to a failed idea. My sympathies. Meanwhile each and every day, science reinforces what everyone with an ounce of common sense knew already — a designer is required to create complex machines, biological or otherwise. And you are left, like a chihuahua barking at the heals of the postman, arguing with the science that you claim to revere.

“I’m quite sure the scientific consensus among knowledgeable experts is that most of our genome is junk. Most of the ENCODE leaders admitted as much in a PNAS paper published 18 months after their original papers appeared in September 2012.”

As we say in the South (about someone who is patently pathetic),

“Well bless your little heart.”

The “consensus among knowledgable experts?” Well lets see, Professor. Who would those experts be? Would they by chance be the ones who agree with you? Not very good at logic are you?

How do we know Encode was wrong?
Knowledgable experts agree!
Who are those knowledgable experts?
They’re the one’s who agree with me.

Got it!

No professor. Encode knocked out ANOTHER of your icons. No matter what the current number, more DNA is functional than you believed, and its important to note that you “BELIEVED” it was non-functional based not on the science but on your ideology — as an article of faith — and your faith has now taken ANOTHER big hit from science while ID proponents just yawned and said, “hey, that’s what we expected.”

I also note that as has been shown on this very site, Encode is just the beginning. New functionality continues to be shown for what was once thought junk and as already stated — even if the “junk” is simply a spacer — it is still functional. Calling it “junk” is just expressing an article of faith. Thinking people dismiss you and your bankrupt religion and are open to the evidence that has always pointed to design.

From the moment Pasteur put the nail in the coffin of spontaneous generation to Crick recognizing that,

“…the odds of a simply polypeptide chain putting itself together by chance are greater than all the individual atoms in the universe…” (Life Itself)

Naturalism was D.O.A. The tide has been rising on you ever since and it continues to get worse (if you can get worse than D.O.A. Crick was at 10^80 but Meyer puts the number at 10^1000 plus) and yet you irrationally hang on to your faith — against all odds. Hey, it’s good to be a man of faith.

If things keep going like they’re going, it won’t be long before “Darwinism” (in quotes to encompass all the latest iterations and avoid semantic distractions) will take its rightful place next to alchemy in the hall of failed ideas. What a wonderful time to be alive, indeed.

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