Saturday, December 04, 2004

I do not have a National Geographic...

I would not read it for much other than its worth for satire, on the whole.

The National Geographic's scholarship:
Embryology too involved patterns that couldn’t be explained by coincidence. Why does the embryo of a mammal pass through stages resembling stages of the embryo of a reptile? Why is one of the larval forms of a barnacle, before metamorphosis, so similar to the larval form of a shrimp? Why do the larvae of moths, flies, and beetles resemble one another more than any of them resemble their respective adults? Because, Darwin wrote, “the embryo is the animal in its less modified state” and that state “reveals the structure of its progenitor”....

cf. National Geographic Shoots Itself in the Foot—Again!

This reasoning is based on known frauds. Typically, if you are going to smash some stupid and silly ideas you will pick the weakest one and have at it. But to be honest, given this article, it is difficult to choose. This is one I knew off hand as a "merging" fraud that has been put in textbooks although it has been known for over one hundred years or so to be a fraud. There are others still in textbooks too. Yet there is this big deal made of putting the word "theory" on these textbooks with a sticker. You can read that site if you are interested in just how many times the N.G. shoots itself in the foot in that instance. It is fairly lengthy.

But about this instance:
When Haeckel’s embryos are viewed side-by-side with actual embryos, there can be no doubt that his drawings were deliber ately distorted to fit his theory. (Figure 5-2) Writing in the March 2000, issue of Natural History, Stephen Jay Gould noted that Haeckel “exaggerated the similarities by idealizations and omissions,” and concluded that his drawings are characterized by “inaccuracies and outright falsification.” Richardson, interviewed by Science after he and his colleagues published their now-famous comparisons between Haeckel’s drawings and actual embryos, put it bluntly: “It looks like it’s turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology.”

So Haeckel’s drawings are fakes, and they misrepresent the embryos they purport to show. But they are fakes in another sense, too. Darwin based his inference of common ancestry on the belief that the earliest stages of embryo development are the most similar. Haeckel’s drawings, however, omit the earliest stages entirely, and start at a point midway through development. The earlier stages are much different.

(Icons of Evolution
by Johnathan Wells
(Regnery, 2000) :92)

That site mentions the same things:

We have known for almost 150 years that the “Biogenetic Law” is not correct, and that human embryos do not possess gill slits (see Assmuth and Hull, 1915; Grigg, 1996, 1998; Pennisi, 1997; Richardson, 1997a, 1997b; Youngson, 1998). Even though it was common knowledge by the end of the 1920s that Haeckel’s concepts, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s words, had “utterly collapsed” (1977a, p. 216), Haeckel’s drawings and ideas still continue to turn up in modern biology texts and instructional tools as a “proof” of evolution.

National Geographic Shoots Itself in the Foot—Again! (scroll way down)

Well, I suppose that the MTVeee generation is too stupid to know or care anyway. But they are still being conditioned and indoctrinated in various ways. At the end of the Geographic article it ends with a picture of a Russian convict with a big tattoo on his chest. It says something about how he picked up the tattoo and some disease in a Russian prison. It goes on to say that his best hope for a cure is medical science, science! The tattoo on him was of a huge cross, a religious icon. That seems to be the symbolism of what subpagans are after. Do you not know that religion is associated with disease and criminality? Hey, maybe it is a disease and people should be quarantined for the sake of medical science?

Do not fail to consider that subpagan proto-Nazis may think exactly that, secretly. Ironically, the exact opposite pattern is true, sociologists have proven that there are negative correlations between Christianity, crime and disease. (Images of diseased convicts with huge religous icons tattooed on them not withstanding.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

True the national geographic magazine article was horrid. But you haven’t answer why you believe creationism to be true, or a superior science, I stammer to call it science, to evolutionary science. You avoid it. I know why, because with accurate, credible science, you or other creationists cannot defend or prove its validity. You have to accept it using only faith, not proof. And if they do try to answer the questions in scientific terms, they use erroneous science. For example, take the 2nd law of thermodynamics, widely used argument against evolution.

The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." [Atkins, 1984, The Second Law, pg. 25] Or basically "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy leads to the idea of unusable energy. This corresponds to intuitive concept of chaos, disorder, but not always. This is where creationist go wrong. They say that invariably things progress from order to disorder. But life is not a closed system! The energy provided by the sun is exceedingly sufficient. In any nontrivial system with large amounts of energy working in it, it is almost certain, order will arise somewhere in that system. For example, order coming from disorder in nature: snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning.


gish

mynym said...

"But you haven’t answer why you believe creationism to be true, or a superior science..."

Discussing Good and Evil and narratives about origins is not necessarily a scientific discussion, as evolutionists define science as being naturalistic, no supernatural. Although any discussion of origins actually is about history, philosophy and so on, and not just "science."

Fascist scholarship's "weakness
is due not to inferior training but to the
mendacity inherent in any scholarship that
overlooks or openly repudiated all
moral and spiritual values."
(Max Weinreich, Hitler's Proffessors: The Part of
Scholarship in Germany's Crimes
against the Jewish People. (New York: The
Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946) :7)

Evolutionists get themselves into trouble by assuming philosophic naturalism (being anti-spiritual) and then telling everyone their findings as if it is surprising that they found only what they look for, while rejecting everything else. They amass mounds of "evidence" this way, which is really just silly. It leads to them using a fish fossil as an index to date rocks and the like. Then, a fisherman shows them that he caught that type of fish the other day because actually they are nocturnal. So then they have an index fossil that they were also using to try to blur or merge together the clear typologies of Nature that actually goes totally against what they are using it for. How could they be that wrong so often?

Yet, they simply discard quite a bit of evidence by playing a game with the term "science." For instance, although eye witness testimony may be unreliable at a crime scene, if there is a repeating pattern to a large number of witnesses' testimony it can be taken as credible, true. Their testimony cannot simply be discarded out of hand just because it happened in the past and it is asserted that people are more "primitive" in the past.

You cannot do that if you are interested in the truth, regardless what you call "science." Yet evolutionists do tend to just discard all ancient texts as "superstitions," out of hand.

I see no reason to try to use science as a buzzword for truth as so many people do. I see history, Hitler's Scientists (by Cromwell), genocide based on naturalistic scientific principles, scientific psychiatric abuses in totalitarian regimes, the medicalization of politics, junk science, evolutionist's hoaxes, frauds, deceptions and proto-Nazi fear mongering, invidious discrimination against IDers. I may cite instances of this later.

Then there are the socialist's claims of science, science, by which they ready supposed utopias of "heaven on earth" that turn out to be hell on earth. And so on. My arguments are often about Good and Evil, history, philosophy and the human mind, the human spirit. None of these things are necessarily scientific but each one contains important truths, often more important than science.

I will also look at the science of things, knowing that hypotheses and theories have changed much more than basic philosophy and logic have.

I will comment on what you say tomorrow.

I think you will have a hard time finding as much fraud, proto-Nazism and just general moral degeneracy among IDers or creationists as evolutionists. I can go through evolutionist culture, proving such. This is because Good and Evil are important.

It's late. Tomorrow I'll answer you on the disorder, order issue from Intelligent Design. That's the only way that order and disorder are defined in a transcendent sense anyway, by intelligence.

mynym said...

This pretty much answers you.

http://www.trueorigin.org/steiger.asp

It's long, but that is a big Cosmic issue, after all. As a basic matter of philosophy, who or what defines order? When you look at a snowflake and say, "That is ordered." what makes you say that? Why should all agree? Or my favorite, who are you to judge? There are assumptions you are making about self evident truths.

Also interesting on the issue of order:
"...the probability of all the ingredients coming together to make life possible must not be too small. In fact it turns out to be virtually infinitesimal. As Roger Penrose remarks,

'How big was the original phase-space volume. . . that the Creator had to aim for in order to provide a universe compatible with the second law of thermodynamics and with what we now observe? . . . The Creator’s aim must have been [precise] to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123. This is an extraordinary figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full, in the ordinary denary notation: it would be “1” followed by 10^123 successive “O”s! Even if we were to write a “0” on each separate proton and on each separate neutron in the entire universe—and we could throw in all the other particles as well for good measure—we should fall far short of writing down the figure needed. [Such is] the precision needed to set the universe on its course.'

To circumvent such vast improbabilities [an impossibility is defined by physicists as less] cosmologists like Alan Guth and Frank Tipler inflate the number of possible worlds where human beings might have arisen. Given an infinite number of possible worlds, any event that has positive probability, however small, is sure to happen in at least one of those possible worlds. So long as humanity has a positive probability of arising, it is therefore sure to arise in some possible world. And since only those worlds where humanity arises will have human beings that recognize their good fortune of being in a world that gave rise to them, chance becomes a perfectly acceptable way of accounting for humanity."
(Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology
By William Dembski :266)

Notice that you said something earlier about, "If it is supernatural, it is not science." There are holes in that in various ways. You see, many scientists are positing parallel universes, a Multi-verse, etc. These are unobservable hypotheses, outside of the Nature we exist in. They are supernatural hypotheses.

Yet, let's say that one of these fellows keeps lecturing on about quantuum mechanics and the possibility of a Multi-verse. Then someone says, "Yeah, it sounds like you are saying there could be a heaven, another dimension. Not the heavens....but heaven, just like in the Bible."

Well, he would have a tizzy about it. I have found that the real issue for evolutionists who are so-called "scientists" is that they are anti-Christian, anti-religion. So even if they are saying something that comports with the Bible, they tend to be loathe to admit it.

Odd, isn't it? That is their sort of bigotry which leads them into stupidity of all sorts. It seems they'll believe in pretty much anything but the God of the Jews.

I will put a comment on the front page about the story of fishermen catching one of evolutionists "missing links." Note, they use certain fossils as an index to date other things with.