Americans are divided over whether humans and other living things evolved over time or have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, according to a new poll.
Americans also wish someone would make fudge-covered pork rinds with peanut butter filling, slathered in nacho cheese. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea.
"We acknowledge there may be some confusion about the meaning of these terms," said Luis Lugo of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. But Lugo said the findings suggest wide support for teaching students different ideas.
"Many people take the default position -- teach both sides and let people make up their own minds," Lugo said.
Bullshit. Pew is asking loaded questions to skew the result toward their pre-decided inclination. Let's break this down one more time. Lugo has made my job infinitely simpler here by using one wrong word -- "both". "Both" is a finite quantifier; that is, it means two and only two possibilities. Not three, not one, not none, not ten. Two and only two.
So what these ideologues have been postulating is a false dichotomy -- that only evolution or ID can explain things, and that the two theories are scientifically equivalent in terms of accuracy and merit.
They are lying -- flat out lying -- on both counts, and they know it.
Creationism is mythology, period. As we've discussed many times before, there are a great many mythologies. Every religion and every cult has one, and many ethnic cultures also have their own creation mythos, which may or may not be entwined with a particular religious outlook.
And shame on the Associated Press for fashioning a cheesy article out of this tripe and maintaining the pretense that it's all just another scientific theory. It is not science, it is politics dressed up as religion.
And actual scientists need to start being more proactive about speaking up on this subject. Every time some bullshit think tank or policy forum runs another puff piece disguised as a legitimate poll, one of them has to step up and concisely explain exactly why it's bullshit. Over and over, again and again.
It sucks and it's retarded that 500 years after Galileo and Copernicus and Kepler and Tycho Freakin' Brahe straightened out a lot of misconceptions, modern scientists have to keep explaining stupid shit to stupid people, but they have to, because this is all really about getting certain peoples' backs up just in time to vote for a knuckle-dragger. It would be nice if we could just keep them home by distracting them with pet rocks and Survivor reruns, but it doesn't seem to be quite enough.
2 comments:
your reference to galileo, brahe, and copernicus shows again that this whole thing is simply insane. for, not only would "both sides" have to be taught in biology class, but in astronomy, chemistry, and physics classes. laughable.
try explaining how we can measure time using the magnitude-distance formula. then explain to little Timmy that even though the math shows that light that we see on earth from some stars is millions of years old, the universe is only 10,000 years old. because god is a joker and he likes fucking with people.
Of course this is stupid shit; but here's a feeble attempt at an explanation of why, at a deeper level, these morons won't stop attacking Darwinian evolutionism while leaving modern physics alone. Contemporary natural science is not only explanatory, but also predictive--it foretells how a range of phenomena is going to behave. Special relativity predicted, for instance, the bending of light around massive sources of gravitation; and quantum mechanics made the ultimate prediction: the atomic bomb. For the uneducated intellect, this is the only legitimacy of science--predicting and doing stuff. But neo-Darwinism has still a rather limited predictive potential, compared to the exact sciences. Perhaps this is why some would-be 'intellectuals' like Michael Behe and countless morons who think they can talk about biology have the guts to attack evolutionary theory. Just a thought.
But you're right that the scientific establishment should be more aggressive in combating these retards.
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