More hysterical idiocy, in an article on man made global warming (seattlepi.com)
Starting around 500 years ago, when the prominent thinkers of the day (Copernicus, Galileo) were ridiculed for claiming the Earth was round and the planets rotated around the sun, a pattern has followed: Conservatives have lost most of the major battles where they fought science and/or big progressive social advances. They opposed ending slavery, and lost. They believed women should not vote, and lost. Conservatives ridiculed Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, and eventually the majority of the people of the planet accepted it. More recently conservatives opposed civil rights, and had to watch as Americans came to embrace a more enlightened view on race relations and fairness.
Let’s break this
- It was Democrats who opposed ending slavery. They were also the ones who were primarily against the Civil Rights Act
- The bit about Conservatives denying women the right to vote is unsupported by fact
- Consensus regarding Darwinism does not make Evolution a fact. Facts do, and the Darwiniacs are still looking for facts to support their theory. Usually it is because their “evidence did not fossilize” or something silly.
- Again, it was a majority of Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Act, and, it is Democrats who have the most problems with race, as they attempt to keep minorities, particularly Blacks, bottled up and beholden to the Democrat Party. It is Democrats who treat Blacks, women, gays, etc, as people in need of government protection because they are not good enough to do it on their own. Fairness means giving some groups preference over others.
It’s no wonder so many people are skeptical about global warming, when you get idiotic foolishness that is not only unsupported by fact, but is directly contradicted by fact.
Oh, and let’s look at a breakdown of what the Democrats have done to Blacks.
Teach said: Consensus regarding Darwinism does not make Evolution a fact. Facts do, and the Darwiniacs are still looking for facts to support their theory. Usually it is because their “evidence did not fossilize†or something silly.
That life appeared on earth more than two billion years ago is a fact. Life forms were very different at that time than they are today. Life forms have changed and diversified over time. Species are related via common descent from one or a few common ancestors. The theory of evolution explains these facts.
A good scientific theory has both explanatory and predictive power. For instance, Darwin predicted, based on homologies with African apes, that human ancestors arose in Africa. This prediction has been supported by fossil and genetic evidence. The theory also predicted that organisms in heterogeneous and rapidly changing environments should have higher mutation rates. This has been found in the case of bacteria infecting the lungs of chronic cystic fibrosis patients.
1. you apparently have no idea what Darwin’s theory actually states, because, based on your above description, that is not Darwinism.
2. There is still no proof. No fossils, no way to explain eyes, no way to explain the pre-Cambrian to cambrian era, no way to show one species evolving in to another, etc, and so on.
you apparently have no idea what Darwin’s theory actually states, because, based on your above description, that is not Darwinism.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection is one mechanism (though we now know about others, such as mutation and genetic drift) that explains why species have evolved over time.
There is still no proof. No fossils, no way to explain eyes, no way to explain the pre-Cambrian to cambrian era, no way to show one species evolving in to another, etc, and so on.
There are multiple lines of evidence in support of the theory of evolution. If you’re interested, this is a great site:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/lines_01
no fossils
The fossil record indisputably shows that life forms that are present today were not present billions of years ago. In the oldest rocks you find nothing but bacteria and the chemical traces thereof. Then you find simple multi-celled organisms. Then in the late Precambrian, more complex life forms begin to appear, all marine invertebrates. The pattern continues in this basic order: hemichordates, chordates, jawless fishes, jawed fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. That’s a very rough overview, but the important fact here is that as you go up the geologic column, from older strata to more recent strata, the types of plants and animals that you find fossilized within them change rather dramatically, but they change in a very specific pattern. Common descent explains this.
no way to explain eyes
Darwin actually addressed this argument in Origin of the Species:
There’s a great demonstration of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stb9pQc9Kq0
no way to explain the pre-Cambrian to cambrian era
On the contrary, the Precambrian fossils that have been found are consistent with a branching pattern. In addition almost none of the animal groups that people think of as groups, such as mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and spiders, appeared in the Cambrian. And all plants postdate the Cambrian. Flowering plants, by far the dominant form of land life today, only appeared about 140 million years ago. All of this indicates present life forms coming from ancestral ones.
Again, while the theory of evolution is not perfect, it provides the best explanation we currently have for the complexity and diversity of all life on earth. If you can provide a better explanation that is consistent with all the empirical data, I would be interested in hearing it.
Darwin was a devout Catholic. So was the Monsignor who first hypothesized the Big Bang Theory.
Charles Darwin was not Catholic. He was a member of the Church of England and at one time studied Anglican theology. He even considered becoming a clergyman before his voyage on the HMS Beagle.
Still hoping Teach will tell me what he considers a better explanation than the theory of evolution.