A comment that got out of hand.

I've already noted various points made in this one here over time. If you're interested in some of the research used search this blog for some of the citations for more.

Source, comments:
Surely you jest, Dr. Numbers.

Rarely come across an anti-scientific notion? Creationists believe that the Bible is a source of evidence that trumps anything a scientist might discover. [...] Another common imprecation was, “Do not let evidence fuel your appreciation of God. Let your appreciation of God influence your view of the evidence.”

It's hard to imagine anything more anti-scientific than that.

Ironically, he'd have no problem with: "Do not let the evidence fuel your appreciation of Nature. Let your appreciation of Nature influence your view of the evidence."

His ignorant criticism of creationist appreciation for the God of Nature is also ironic given that historically it has been those who adhere to creationist values who have generated the type of science and technology typical to the West.

Furthermore, there comes a time when the allegedly scientific arguments you are making are so weak and ignorant that you brand yourself as anti-science simply by offering them. Creationists love science and love what it can do? Then why do they persist in arguing that the second law of thermodynamics contradicts evolution?

Because there are real issues there that have to be drawn out given that ignorant bigots such as this have polluted language. They begin by polluting the term "evolution" to mean anything from a change in the size of finch beaks to the unfolding of any series of events that ever has been or can be. Is that falsifiable and testable? Of course not, yet that is the way the term is polluted by leading proponents of "evolution" and when some try to make a distinction such micro and macro evolution and than creates problems for Darwinists then it is back to all distinction and definition being of the dread "creationists." That's probably because fellows like this who have the urge to merge cannot engage in the definition typical to conceptual thought to save their own Life, so their terms tend to just blur together, sometimes they have even included Life and Death in their mergings. That's "evolution" to those who are conceptually and mentally retarded enough to believe it. Apparently such blurred "reasoning"/imagining evolves to be quite overwhelming when you begin to include your own imagination about the past* as evidence for the truth of your own hypothetical goo.

*An entirely too charitable summary of a form of such "reasoning":

The viewpoint of Coyne et al. (1988) is one in which past events are argued to explain, in a causal sense, the world around us. Such explanations cannot be verified or tested, and the only biological observations they require are that variation and differential reproduction occur. This is not a caricature, as a reading of Coyne et al. will verify. In keeping with this general viewpoint, proponents claim that species are explained with reference to history. Important characters are hence “mechanisms” that have established and maintained the separation between diverged lineages of an ancestral population. According to Coyne et al., even the adaptive purpose of the changes that resulted in these mechanisms is irrelevant.
We would ask where biology enters into this schema. The answer is that it does not. Rather, biology is interpreted in terms of a range of historical processes, including selection of variation over time. This could, with equal relevance, be used to understand any nonbiological phenomenon such as the development of the automobile, agricultural methods, culture, or men’s suits (Lewontin, 1976).

(Points of View
Species and Neo-Darwinism
By C. S. White; B. Michaux; D. M. Lambert
Systematic Zoology, Vol. 39, No. 4. (Dec., 1990), :400-401) (Emphasis added)

I suppose they cannot heap the contempt and disdain on the blindness of Darwinists that they deserve in such a forum. But it is not a caricature, even if those with the urge to merge immediately catch a fright at the definition that comes with their own text so that they must snivel of "quote mining," etc. It was actually known from early times that despite the specious title of his book, Darwinism does not and cannot explain the origin of things or the origin of any specific information.

E.g.

That Darwinism is not the whole doctrine of evolution is perceived clearly enough by Mr. O’Neill, who devotes two or three opening chapters to a lucid exposition of the well known fact that Natural Selection does not explain the origin of characters. This truth has for twelve years been maintained by the editors of this journal, as well as by others, and has been epitomized in the statement that “the origin of the fittest” is the primary problem of evolution, while the “survival of the fittest“ (Darwinism) is secondary.

(Review: The Refutation of Darwinism, and the Converse Theory of Development, Based Exclusively Upon Darwin's Facts by T. Warren O'Neill
The American Naturalist Vol. 14, No. 3 (Mar., 1880), :193) (Emphasis added)

That was their way of saying that Darwinism does not explain the origin of the information characteristic to the formation of organisms. Creationists all, I suppose...oh, those dread creationists! They'll bring the collapse of civilization and the Dark Ages. (Odd though, how in modern times only those like the Nazis and Communists have believed in worldviews rooted in variants of the Darwinian creation myth, with Dark Ages of barbarity seeming to follow.)

Why do they argue that natural selection is a meaningless tautology....

Please, that wasn't just all "creationists." And in some sense to say that the inanimate is all that "selects" is an argument to remove all the meaning/spirit from things, which is why Darwinism was dead at conception. As noted by this biologist:

“In my previous books... I tried to show that the currently accepted theory of evolution—called ‘neoDarwinism’ or ‘the modern synthesis’—is false. Taking an interest in the history of evolutionary thought in the course of subsequent work, I made a very remarkable and unexpected discovery: nobody, not even Darwin and his closest friends, ever believed in Darwin’s theory of natural selection: Darwinism was refuted from the moment it was conceived.

”
(Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth
Reviewed by Gareth Neslson
Systematic Zoology, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Mar., 1988) :80) (Emphasis added)

What selected natural selection?


All of this was recognized very early and yet the Darwinian creation myth is propped up, clearly for religious reasons, so when creationists use the "holy writ" of its own scientific jargon, i.e. the religion's own terms, as according to this fellow that is like the Devil citing scriptures and so on.

Another critic pointed out that the Darwinan view is dead at conception later, although it was already known from the very beginning the same things must be pointed out time and again:

Electrons and nucleons are not known to be sentient, while the higher animals are. If a rat laps up a solution of saccharine, the rational ex planation of this lies in the fact that the solution tastes sweet and that the rat likes that. The tasting and liking are facts that physics and chemistry as known today cannot explain.
And this conclusion gives the whole show away. Because it acknowledges a conscious desire by an individual capable of such desire, it leads on further to the recognition of deliberate actions by individuals and the possibilities of error on their part. Thus a whole series of conceptions emerges that are absent from physics and chemistry as known today. Indeed, nothing is relevant to biology, even at the lowest level of life, unless it bears on the achievements of living beings: achievements such as their perfection of form, their morphogenesis, or the proper functioning of their organs; and the very conception of such achievements implies a distinction between success or failure—a distinction unknown to physics and chemistry.
But the distinction between success and failure is present in, and is indeed essential to, the science of engineering; and the logic of engineering does substantiate in fact what I am saying here of biology. No physical or chemical investigation of an object can tell us whether it is a machine and, if so, how it works. Only if we have previously discovered that it is a machine, and found out also approximately how it works, can the physical and chemical examination of the machine tell us anything useful about it, as a machine. Similarly, physical and chemical investigations can form part of biology only by bearing on previously established biological achievements, such as shapeliness, morphogenesis, or physiological functions.
A complete physical and chemical topography of a frog would tell us nothing about it as a frog, unless we knew it previously as a frog. And if the rules of scientific detachment required that we limit ourselves exclusively to physical and chemical observations, we would remain forever unaware of frogs or of any other living beings, just as we would remain ignorant also by such observations of all machines and other human contrivances.
The achievements which form the subject matter of biology can be identified only by a kind of appraisal which requires a higher degree of participation by the observer in his subject matter than can be mediated by the tests of physics and chemistry. The current ideal of “scientificality” which would refuse such participation would indeed destroy biology but for the wise neglect of consistency on the part of its supporters.

(Scientific Outlook: Its Sickness and Cure
by Michael Polanyi
Science New Series, Vol. 125, No. 3246 (Mar., 1957), pp. 482)

Essentially what Darwinists have been arguing is that an individual organism has virtually no role in its own evolution. Instead it is all physics, which is "science" and so on. Why do some little fellows that can hardly seem to think through their mind of the synaptic "gaps" keep comparing their hypothetical goo with the theory of gravity? Is the so-called "theory" of natural selection just like the theory of gravity? It seems that in theory the survival of the fittest is fit enough to explain all, yet in fact it does not.

...or that the fossil record contains no transitional forms...

The fossil record doesn't fit with the Darwinian creation myth, that's why creationist rubes are sometimes too comfortable with overblown rhetoric and bombastic negative assertions. Yet they still have a point and vast amounts of evidence for typology, even bigoted fellows like this that rely on small bits of stereotypical knowledge that read like talking points seem to know it on some level. I.e., it is claimed by those with the urge to merge that it is all so "overwhelming" and yet anyone who knows the evidence knows that it annihilates the Darwinian creation myth. There are too many exceptions, to many organisms that do not fit, too much for mere handwaving towards negative theology to fill in. As far as I know, creationists do not deal with all of the evidence against "natural selection" because it does not suit them to point to the life-cycles of parasites as evidence against all adaptations and organisms coming about by a process of minute "natural selections." That's probably because so many seem to view things based on an inversion of Darwinian reasoning: "If not natural selection, then divine selection!" But one shouldn't invert Darwinian "reasoning"/imagining because if you invert excrement it is still excrement, just as when you mutiply by zero you get zero.

...or that elementary probability theory proves evolution is false...

That's been brought up since the Wistar conference. I suppose they were all "creationists." Isn't that just like the Darwinian Herd though, they imagine that they've refuted "creationists" and then come to use that supposed fact to trample all dissent as well. It seems they can do anything once they set the degenerate epistemic standard of citing their own imagination about the past as actual evidence/"facts."

...or that all of the hominid fossils paleontologists have collected are either fully ape or fully human? If you love science then you pause a moment to educate yourself about the basics of the subject.

Anyone who knows the basics about paleoanthropology knows that the vast majority of paleoanthropologists have never even seen the fossils that they're constructing their hypotheses around. Etc., let's not play pretend here.

You don't routinely quote scientists out of context for the purpose of distorting what they believe.

I hope he's not trying to conflate Darwinists with scientists.

Referring to creationists as anti-science is not meant as a description of how they see themselves. It is meant as a description of what they are. Just as the Devil can cite scripture for his purposes, so too can creationists use scientific sounding jargon in making their case.

Now that is funny, coming from those who make use of their own pollution of language, beginning with the term "evolution."

Just as scripture can be cited there are "holy words" of science that can be distorted? Only if you develope words from the very beginning such as the term "evolution" itself that are religious enough to encompass all that is, has been or ever can or will be. After all, if a transcendent being of light came down from the sky and claimed to be responsible for creating Life as we know it that would be natural to us, naturally enough. So supposedly as long as it was here it would be natural and all scientific like, yet if it left then it would be supernatural and religious. That distinction may be fine in some ways, yet using it to claim that "faith" in the future based on records of past events is a lower form of knowledge than "science" or can be contradicted by a "science" based solely on a myopic view of current uniformitarian processes, etc., would be absurd.

The fact remains that in both word and deed their actions drip with contempt for science and scientists. It is terribly naive for Numbers to pretend otherwise.

He's probably playing pretend that those trying to prop up the tattered remnants of the Darwinian creation myth, i.e. Darwinists, are scientists again. Actually I find that most creationists are far to soft on Darwinists given that Darwinists are proto-Nazis by Nature. You might call it a natural selection for the urge to merge to slowly smother their mind of the synaptic gaps into their imagination. For if there is a gap then they imagine that they must fill it by murmuring about what is natural, which is supposedly what is "scientific" to the little fellows. They're not selecting anything as an organism, it is all Nature and natural selections. They cannot select against their own excrement becoming overwhelming to them.

Listen, there is a mind murmuring about how overwhelmed it is now: "There is no point in trying to convince those that are so sure in their belief that they wouldn't recognize overwhelming evidence to the contrary...

So you're overwhelmed by it all. It's a degenerate standard of evidence to imagine that we can slap the term "natural" on things we recognize as patterns and then play pretend that we have explained them, naturally. But very well, I suppose what people mean by natural is physical and by physical they mean something governed basically by a Newtonian worldview, although Newton was one of the dread creationists, etc. We can just assume various assumptions that people seem to be making when they murmur about what "natural" or scientific explanation is vs. what a supernatural explanation would be. Putting all that aside go ahead and overwhelm me and anyone else who cares to be overwhelmed, to begin with something small, what is a natural narrative for the copulatory organ of the male dragon fly? Let us even admit to a degenerate epistemic standard in which once someone has imagined a little story about the past which they call natural, naturally enough, then that is evidence for it. Indeed, if someone can imagine something about it then that is a theory on its way to being verified in fact! So it should be easy to overwhelm beginning with such little things as the copulatory organ of the male dragon fly, as well as hundreds of other adaptations.

Why do I suspect that all the talk of being "overwhelmed" has more to do with the proto-Nazi nature of the Darwinian Herd than much else?